


Forty Miles of Bad Road

by heydoeydoey



Series: The Great WIP Project [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, M/M, okay, okay?, we're just pretending nothing after Winter Soldier happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-16 00:28:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 31,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21262100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heydoeydoey/pseuds/heydoeydoey
Summary: Being a ghost was easy before Steve Rogers tugged a loose thread and unraveled everything.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Guys...I have been working on this fic in fits and starts for literally five years. Major thanks to PR Zed, who betaed the first half of this a full year ago, and to pterawaters who powered through the whole thing over the past couple days. 
> 
> Title is from Bob Dylan's 'Things Have Changed'.

The idea of Brooklyn is too daunting, plus New York is miserable in the summer, steam rising off the pavement and everything reeking of piss and hot garbage. 

He goes to Germany instead. The place where Bucky Barnes ended seems like a good enough place to start. After that fucking Smithsonian exhibit, he’s half-expecting to find a plaque commemorating the spot where Captain America’s best friend plummeted to his death. He doesn’t; it would’ve made it easier. It takes him three days to find the exact stretch of cliff where Bucky fell. 

He doesn’t feel anything standing here, except vertigo. Then again, he can’t remember the last time he felt anything but cold. He’s been a ghost for so long he doesn’t know what it is to be a person anymore. If he was ever a person to begin with, which he has doubted for as long as he  _ can _ remember. People don’t look at him; they don’t touch him except to fix the arm; they put him in cold storage when they don’t need him. They fear him. 

Being a ghost was easy, before Steve Rogers tugged a loose thread and unraveled everything. 

It’s not that he remembers Steve, exactly. It’s not so simple. Sometimes, when he sleeps, Steve’s face is burned into his eyelids because he is the mission. Other times, he snaps awake from a nightmare where Steve is lying beside him, wheezing like every breath might be his last. He dreams of Steve and Bucky as children and as men and as soldiers, but it never seems  _ real _ . 

What is real? For decades it’s been nothing but ice and blood and terse orders. There are things he can’t deny—he’s walking around with Bucky Barnes’ face and he’s always had dreams that could only belong to Bucky, and Captain America looked at him like the bottom had dropped out of his world when the Winter Soldier’s mask came off – but he doesn’t know if that makes them true _ .  _ His brain is too fractured to trust. 

He tears himself away from the edge; it’s obvious he’s not going to achieve anything standing here staring at a chasm wondering what the drop felt like.

Achieve. Like he has some kind of goal, beyond staying alive. 

Then again, he’s wanted to be dead for so long that maybe staying alive is the only goal he needs. 

* * *

Natasha thinks he’s crazy, Steve can tell. He doesn’t hear from her often, but when she does get in touch, there’s something about the deliberate way she doesn’t bring up Bucky that makes it perfectly clear what she thinks. 

Instead, she tells him bits and pieces about her life (her real life, he thinks, not a cover) and comes up with more women he should be asking out, giving away how much of his life she’s still keeping tabs on. 

He doesn’t know how to tell her he’s never going to be interested in anybody but Bucky. He thinks she might know anyway, or at least suspect. Sam does too. Neither of them will say anything until he does, though, and he’s not sure he has the words to explain what Bucky is to him. There isn’t a word for loving someone so much you don’t quite know who you are without him. Not in any of the languages he knows, anyway.

(Dysfunctional, Natasha would say. Sam too, probably.) 

He wakes up in a cold sweat most nights, watching Bucky fall over and over again. It’s not new—it’s the same nightmare he’s had since the day it happened—it just doesn’t have the same ending anymore. He didn’t think it could get worse than Bucky being gone, but this...this is worse.

He feels guilty for thinking that, sometimes, because somewhere inside the Winter Soldier Bucky is alive and that should be the best news he’s gotten in years. But the Bucky who will (might?) come out of all of this won’t be Steve’s Bucky. He couldn’t be, not after everything that’s happened. When he used to dream about Bucky being alive somehow, he always came back the same jerk Steve lost in Germany. It never would have occurred to him to be afraid that he might one day run into a version of Bucky who could look straight at him and have no idea who Steve is, who he is, who they were.

The few case files he’s been able to beg, borrow, and steal don’t tell him much about the Winter Soldier, but that’s not really a surprise. He’s considered asking Tony to hack a few more government agencies (Interpol, maybe MI6), since he has no qualms about it, but Tony will want to know _ why _ . 

Plus, there’s a lot of scrutiny on all of the Avengers now, not just himself and Natasha, and he’s not willing to put anyone else on the line.

He wonders daily if he should’ve gone with Fury to help him clean up the HYDRA mess, but he really can’t spend his whole life being SHIELD’s janitor, and he can’t keep doing it in the interim just because he doesn’t know what else to do. 

When he was growing up, he was half-convinced he’d die of pneumonia or TB before he made it to his twentieth birthday and it was easier not to want things than to be disappointed. Then the war started, and nobody could think of anything beyond that. And now he’s ninety-five with no sense of the life he wants for himself. 

(That’s a lie. He’s better at it than Natasha thinks. He knows exactly what he wants. He’s just never going to get it.)

* * *

The first base is an accident. He stumbles upon it almost halfway between Stuttgart and Munich. It isn’t one he’s been to before, but he may have seen it marked on a map. He didn’t intend to find a HYDRA base; he’d picked a direction at random and just started walking, purely for the novelty of going somewhere without being ordered to. 

(But can anything in his life really be random? This base isn’t familiar right now, but a previous incarnation of himself may have been here, and pulled him back like a magnetic field.)

This one doubles as some kind of biochemical plant, and it seems relatively empty. He’s sure that the order will have gone out to abandon ship, as it were, but certain bases operate on skeleton crews in times of crisis. This could be one of them. 

It’s so easy, like flipping a switch, to become the Winter Soldier. It only takes a matter of minutes—slipping through the fence, breaking the neck of a guard that spots him, moving silently inside the base—to infiltrate. He creeps through the eerily quiet halls. It can’t be empty; the guard was there for a reason. 

The plan forms quickly—so easy, so obvious—when he enters a lab filled with pressurized canisters marked FLAMMABLE in angry red letters. It could be anything (a weaponized toxin, maybe) but he just cares that it will  _ burn _ . 

He finds the next base more deliberately, just over the Polish border, where he eliminates fifty agents in less than an hour. Then, he blows that base up too. 

As missions go, it’s slapdash, poorly planned, and probably draws far too much attention, but he’s not interested in strategy now. He’s just the finger on the trigger of the loaded gun.

He’s exploring an empty munitions factory fifty miles outside Moscow when he moves too carelessly around a corner and finds himself staring down a man he’s sure he put in the ground. 

Nick Fury holds up his hands, palms out, and he doesn’t buy it for a second. Fury doesn’t surrender, not even to death. 

“I thought I killed you,” he says, and it sounds far more confused that he would have liked. 

“Not quite, Sergeant Barnes.”

It takes every ounce of his self-control not to flinch. “That’s not me.”

“Unfortunately, it is.” Fury sounds weary. “I came across your file a few years ago, when we dragged Cap up out of the ice.”

“Did you tell him?”

Fury shakes his head. “There was never a good time.”

He leans heavily against the wall. “What’s in the file?”

“Nothing, anymore. I burned it a couple weeks ago.”

“What now?” he asks, because he seriously doubts Fury is just going to let him go. 

“I could use someone watching my six.” Fury shrugs. “And I figure you can help me find some loose ends that need tying.”

“What about Steve?”

“That’s your business, not mine.”

“You trust me on your six?”

“The way I see it, you already killed Nick Fury. We’re both just ghosts now.”

He doubts he’ll get a better offer and he’s not sure he really has a choice. 

* * *

“Have you considered he doesn’t want to be found?” Sam asks. 

“Of course I have,” Steve sighs. “But I can’t just  _ stop _ searching.”

“It’s only been a few weeks. Unless you want to wander around playing Marco Polo, we might have to wait for some more intel.”

They’re standing in line at U.S. Customs at Dulles, back from a wasted trip to Poland, where they turned up less than nothing. The HYDRA bases that were supposed to be in Krakow and Gdansk were blown off the map entirely, which could’ve been Fury or Bucky or almost anyone else thanks to Natasha dumping everything onto the Internet.

There’s a reason Steve is a soldier, not a spy. He  _ hates _ watching and waiting. He likes strategy and action and resolution. 

“I’m sorry,” Sam says. “I know this must seriously suck.”

“I don’t even know if he’s still alive.”

“He’s alive. If he were dead, the whole world would know about it.” 

A traffic camera caught some of his fight with Bucky on the bridge and the video went viral the same day. Then, someone taking a picture of the helicarriers coming down also got a blurry shot of Bucky dragging Steve out of the Potomac and the Internet exploded in confusion and fascination. It’s not particularly reassuring to think he could wake up one morning and find it trending on Twitter that the Winter Soldier was found dead, but he figures Sam has a point that no news is good news.

His phone starts ringing on the train back into the city. He doesn’t recognize the number, and when that happens it’s usually either a journalist or a telemarketer, but on the unlikely hope it could be Bucky, he answers. 

“Hello?”

“Hi, Steve. This is Sharon.” She hesitates. “Your neighbor.”

He wonders if Natasha gave her his number. “Sharon,” he says coolly. “Did I leave my stereo on again?”

“My aunt asked me to call.”

“Your aunt the insomniac?”

“My aunt Peggy Carter.”

“Peggy is your aunt?”

“She didn’t tell you? She said she was going to tell you.”

“She has Alzheimer’s.” 

“Yes, the flaw in that plan has become clear. But she asked me to ask you to come see her.”

“When?”

“As soon as possible? She seemed upset.”

Steve sighs. “I can be there this afternoon.”

“Thank you,” she says, and Steve hangs up before she can apologize or ask him to go for coffee.

Sam shoots him a questioning look. “Sharon the not-nurse?”

“Not you too.”

Sam laughs. “I’m just saying, I make a good wingman.”

“I don’t need a wingman.” Steve runs a hand over his face and calculates how much of a nap he can get in once he makes it to his apartment and takes a shower. Probably no more than forty minutes, if he wants to get to Peggy during visiting hours.

“No,” Sam says seriously, “I guess you don’t.”

Peggy’s having a good day, the nurse assures him when he arrives, but Steve doesn’t set much store by that. She’s had good days where she’s looked at him blankly and she’s had bad days where she’s looked him right in the eyes and remembered every single conversation they’ve ever had, and she’s had days in between. From what he can tell, that’s just the nature of the illness.

He’s too out of context here for people to look at him and see Captain America, especially when he wears a baseball cap and glasses like he did in the Apple Store with Natasha. He once overheard one of the nurses saying how sweet it is that Peggy’s grandson visits so frequently. The same nurse also slipped her phone number into his jacket pocket. He found it two days later and never called. 

“Steve.” Peggy smiles at him, although there’s something nervous in the way it wavers. 

“Hey Peggy.” He smiles back and sits down in the same chair he always does. “You look good.”

She rolls her eyes at him. “You’ve gotten ever so slightly better at talking to women. You look tired.”

“Just got back from Poland.”

“Visiting your old haunts?”

“More or less.” Steve shrugs. 

“Sharon told me about the Winter Soldier,” Peggy says, looking down at her hands. “I saw him once, in Minsk. I thought I was seeing a ghost, at first.”

“Bucky.” Steve sighs. “You saw Bucky.”

She nods. “I’m sorry, Steve. I tried so hard to get him back, but it was the Cold War. Interagency cooperation wasn’t exactly at its best, and Howard was more interested in searching for you. Then we got involved in Korea and Vietnam and before I knew it decades had passed and they pushed me into retirement.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“It’s not yours either,” she says, and even all these years later she can still read him with one look. 

“If I’d just caught him, or jumped after him, none of this would’ve happened.”

“You’ll drive yourself mad, thinking like that.”

“I’ve been looking for him.”

“You won’t find him if he doesn’t want you to.”

“I know.”

“Maybe you should let him find you. When he’s ready.”

“I’m not so good at waiting.”

Peggy frowns. “You won’t convince me of that. You’re still waiting for the right partner, aren’t you?”

“That obvious, huh?”

“Oh, probably not to everyone. But I knew you both, then. You never looked happier than you did with him.”

“We were never...” Steve hesitates, fumbling to find the right words. “Nothing ever happened. There was just this...possibility. And impossibility, really. You were always my best girl.”

“I never thought you couldn’t love us both,” Peggy says, kindly. “Although I’m sure most people would prefer a less...complicated story.”

Steve nods, a lump forming in his throat. “I don’t know what to do, Peggy.”

“When the time comes, you will.”

* * *

Their agendas are slightly different. He wants to trash it all, destroy everything that HYDRA ever touched, including himself, but that’s not Fury’s game; instead, Fury has a list of strategically located targets scattered across Europe. 

(Apparently, there’s second team with its own list, too. He didn’t ask for details and he doubts Fury would give him any if he did ask. People who trade in secrets don’t give them away freely.)

After Poland, they go to London, where there are cameras on every corner and his skin crawls with the knowledge that he can’t possibly be dodging them all. For a man supposedly trying to be a ghost, Fury doesn’t seem to care who might be watching.

He remembers a London gray and smudged with rain and red buses whizzing by. He doesn’t know whose memory it is, Bucky Barnes or the Winter Soldier or both.

Fury claps him on the shoulder in the rush-hour crowd and steers him towards the stairs of an Underground station. It’s not until they’re on the train, hurtling through dark tunnels that he breaks out in a cold sweat and every instinct he has screams  _ get off the fucking train _ . 

The train shudders to a stop and the doors open with a pneumatic whoosh and he’s outside on the platform inhumanly fast. People are staring, he can feel every single pair of eyes on him, and behind those sunglasses he knows Fury’s looking too.

The Winter Soldier would bolt and James Buchanan Barnes would force himself back on the train. Or maybe it’s the other way around. He doesn’t know.

He doesn’t fucking know anything right now. Fury slips onto the platform just before the doors hiss closed.

“Bus it is,” Fury says, and he feels a burst of something he identifies as gratitude after a few long seconds.

The bus ride is shorter than he expects, and he follows Fury through the bustle on the streets to a tower of flats facing the river. It doesn’t look like a HYDRA front, or a SHIELD outpost. 

“Safe house,” Fury says. “We’re borrowing it.”

“From?”

“A friend. No one you’ve met.”

Like every safe house he’s been in, this one is bland and uncluttered, the air smells stale and there’s a fine layer of dust over everything. The windows face south and east, and he counts eleven different ways to break in.

“We’re only here for a few hours,” Fury says. “Just somewhere to be off the street while we wait.”

“For what?”

“Intel.”

He’s tempted to ask from whom, but he knows he’ll only get a vague non-answer. This is how Fury operates, never trusting anyone with all the information at once. It’s probably what saved his life. Multiple times.

“He’s looking for you,” Fury says, his tone deliberately casual.

“Figured.” He shrugs, regretting it when his shoulder twinges. It didn’t heal properly after the fight with Steve on the helicarrier. 

“This thing,” Fury taps his own temple, “it’s not an easy fix.”

_ Fuck off, _ he wants to say. “There is no fix,” he says instead.

“I have an operative who had a literal god in his head and he’s come through the other side.”

There’s no one in his head but all the different fragments of him. There’s no one to push out and there’s no reset button to take him back to the beginning, before HYDRA started fucking with him. There’s no scenario where this ends happily. Captain America and his childhood friend, his Howling Commando, are never going to be reunited. He’s just the space Bucky Barnes used to inhabit.

They retreat to separate corners until someone raps twice on the door and slides a file through the mail slot. Fury picks it up, scans it quickly, and signals for him to follow.

Business as usual.

* * *

The photo is slightly out of focus and the heavy rain makes it hard to say for sure, but Steve is positive it’s Bucky. Sam isn’t as easily convinced.

“Where did you even find this?”

“Natasha sent it to me.”

“For someone who didn’t want you to pull the thread, she’s sending a lot of help.”

Steve shrugs. “It was my decision. She’s not holding a grudge.”

“Where is this? London?”

“Yeah,” Steve nods. “It turned up a couple days ago, apparently.”

“Why would he go to London in the first place? There are CCTV cameras  _ everywhere _ .”

“Why is he traipsing all over Europe at all?” Steve frowns. “There are easier ways to disappear.”

“What makes you think he’s trying to disappear?”

“What else would he be doing?”

“He completes missions. That’s all he’s done for seventy years. Without orders, maybe he’s been finding his own.”

Steve can’t imagine Bucky choosing to be a gun for hire. Then again, this isn’t exactly Bucky he’s dealing with anymore either.

Sam looks like he regrets suggesting it. “I’m just saying, if it is him, he’s not out there backpacking or seeing the sights.”

The thought doesn’t occur to Steve until later, after Sam has gone. He’s avoided seeking out SHIELD’s secrets on the Internet, since  _ SHIELD was HYDRA all along _ is really the only one he needs to know, but a quick Google search gives him a list of all the bases that are HYDRA fronts. 

Gdansk is on it, and Krakow, and one in London, as well as dozens of others.

He dials Natasha’s number. 

“Hey Cap,” she answers, sounding cheerful. It’s strange; he’s used to serious, calculated Natasha. Not that her cheerfulness can’t be calculated, but it sounds genuine.

“You hear from Fury lately?”

“Radio silence. Why?”

“I think Bucky is going after HYDRA.”

“You think they’ll cross paths.”

“If they haven’t already.”

“Nick would tell you.”

“You sure about that?”

Natasha sighs. “No. But I trust his reasons.”

“It’s not so easy for me.”

“It wasn’t for me, either, in the beginning. You’ll get there.”

Steve doubts that. There is a fundamental difference between him and Natasha, and despite how well they get along, she’ll always be a spy and he’ll always be a soldier. 

“You should come to New York,” Natasha says, very pointedly changing the subject. 

“All of us under one roof sounds like a disaster.”

“Or a sitcom.” Natasha laughs. “Stark wants you to come. He seems to be having some difficulty getting in touch with you.”

He hasn’t been screening Tony’s calls, exactly; he’s just been waiting to call back until he has more patience to deal with Tony. Which could be never.

“I’ll call him.” He lies. 

“You’re not any better at that over the phone.” 

“I just can’t leave D.C. yet.” 

“It’s not so bad here. Stark’s working on his boundary issues.”

“You make it sound so inviting.”

“I’ll let you know if I hear anything from Nick.”

“Thanks, Nat.”

* * *

Steve insisted he’d be fine on his own, but Bucky couldn’t sleep thinking of Steve alone in that apartment. He knew Steve could take care of himself – Steve was determined to prove it just about every minute of the day – but that didn’t stop Bucky worrying.

“I gotta get out from under my ma’s thumb,” he said a few weeks after the funeral. “Wanna look for a place?”

The apartment they could afford was a shithole; the heat barely worked and the pipes clanked and clattered at night. Still, Bucky could lie next to Steve and make sure his lungs were still working, even though it had been years since Steve was sick enough that they might actually stop.

(He was sixteen when Mrs. Rogers came to get him in the middle of the night because she needed help to take Steve to the hospital. Bucky was pretty sure he’d never forget the terror of those three days and the grim expressions on the doctors’ faces.)

“I love you,” he used to tell Steve when he was sure Steve was asleep. It seemed wrong to stay it to Steve’s face, when he was awake. He knew Steve felt the same (not because Steve had ever said it or anything, but because Bucky knew Steve like he knew his own two hands) and Bucky wasn’t aiming to get Steve into any more trouble than Steve already got himself into.

And stuff like that was just asking for trouble, especially with a landlord who looked at them a little funny, and the guys at school whose noses Bucky used to break when they hissed names at Steve under their breath. 

“Sergeant,” Fury says, and he snaps back to himself. He’s been doing that more, lately, crawling down the rabbit hole of Bucky’s memories before he even notices it coming on.

“Yes, sir,” he says, trying to hide that has no idea what Fury was saying while he was mentally in 1938.

“I think you should sit this one out.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve been in your head all day. All week, even.”

He clenches his jaw. He can’t explain that it won’t happen while they’re inside, because inside is the mission and nothing gets between the Winter Soldier and the mission – except Steve Rogers and it seems unlikely he’s going to show up in the next hour – because Fury won’t understand. Can’t possibly understand. He’s not even sure  _ he _ understands. 

“It won’t be a problem,” he says shortly.

“All well and good to say that, but if it goes FUBAR, I can’t exactly stop you.”

He laughs; a cold, humorless sound that’s nothing like Bucky’s laugh in his memories (dreams? nightmares?). “So much for trusting me on your six.”

“Being reckless isn’t what’s kept me alive this long.”

“Fine. I’ll wait here.”

Fury nods and starts moving before he has a chance to change his mind. He watches Fury slip through a hole in the fence and skirt around the edges of a few outbuildings before disappearing into the base and out of sight. 

A cool breeze picks up and sends a chill down his spine. This is what it was like to be Bucky during the war, he thinks, the sniper waiting in a fucking tree or up a hill fifty yards away, watching and feeling strangely helpless despite the rifle in his hands as the rest of the Commandos charged into danger. 

He hears the crack of a gunshot, loud and final, and a second shot almost immediately after, and something like eagerness settles into his gut. Fury’s contact in Ravenna said the Lugo outpost was abandoned.

He moves quickly and silently, following the same path around the outbuildings Fury took, dodging landmines. The door squeals on its hinges and he freezes, hidden in the shadows. No one comes to investigate, so he slips through the opening and creeps along the wall, mentally recalling the schematics they’d reviewed earlier.

He hears the whoosh of air just before the arrow grazes his cheek, drawing blood as it flies past, and imbeds itself into the wall next to his head. He rolls his shoulder, and the mechanisms inside the arm start to whir.

“Stand down, Hawkeye.” Fury barks. “You too, Sergeant.”

Hawkeye drops down from a beam above him, landing lightly on his feet, a grin spreading across his face.

“Sorry. Just had to prove I could get the drop on you.”

“You’re an idiot, Barton,” says an agent who was doing such a good job blending in with the wall the Winter Soldier didn’t even notice him. He calls Barton an idiot the way Steve called Bucky a jerk, more fond than critical.

“What?” Barton shrugs. “He knows who I am, he would’ve done the same.”

“He’s right,” he admits, although given that he’s obviously among Fury’s allies it seems like the wrong time to mention that the Winter Soldier wouldn’t have missed, intentionally or otherwise.

HYDRA never wanted to eliminate Hawkeye, or he wouldn’t be standing here now, but before Barton went straight he was on their radar as a sniper for hire. On the Winter Soldier’s radar too, given their similar skill sets.

“Here.” The agent hands him a handkerchief he takes from the breast pocket of his perfectly pressed suit. “You’re bleeding.”

He takes the handkerchief wordlessly and presses it to his cheek.

“I was under the impression Barton and Coulson were in Estonia. They thought we were in Paris.” Fury explains. “Almost killed each other.”

Barton snorts. “Kind of the downside of going rogue. No reliable communication.”

“You’d know,” Coulson says, more sharp than affectionate this time.

“Aw, honey, not in front of the kids.” Barton smirks and Coulson doesn’t smile exactly, but his expression softens. 

“We should confirm we really are alone,” Fury suggests. “You two go down, we’ll go up and hopefully meet back here without incident.”

Barton retrieves his arrow from the wall and, after inspecting it for any damage, returns it to the quiver on his back.

“Why arrows?” he asks as they start down the stairs to the first subterranean level.

“You want the truth or the SHIELD justification?”

“Truth.”

“They’re more fun.”

“And SHIELD?”

“Good for stealth ops, which is pretty much all I’m allowed to do these days. The shrinks won’t clear me for teamwork.”

They fall silent for the forty minutes it takes to search and verify there isn’t anyone on any of the underground floors.

“This place is empty. It’s been almost ten weeks. Any rats left will have gone to ground.”

It’s hard to fathom that it’s only been ten weeks since Washington. It feels like an eternity, but he can’t rely on how things feel when it comes to time anymore. He doesn’t have instincts he can trust after all his cryo-freezes.

Fury and Coulson are waiting for them when they return from the basement levels.

“Empty,” Barton says, and Coulson nods.

They agree to stay put for the night and take advantage of a relatively secure location to get some sleep. They choose the records room as their barracks and Fury offers to take the first watch.

He drifts to sleep surprisingly quickly (and he won’t examine what it means that a HYDRA base is where he feels safe enough to sleep) but he can’t have been out very long, because when he wakes Fury is still sitting sentinel by the door.

He’s not sure what woke him for a few long, silent moments until he hears it again. A muffled whimper, somewhere beyond his metal shoulder. He regrets turning to look almost instantly, because Barton is curled up in a tight ball, almost in Coulson’s lap, his face buried in the curve of Coulson’s neck. He’s shaking, and Coulson murmurs something. 

When he turns away, he finds Fury watching him with something like pity on his face.

* * *

Steve gets the call in the middle of the night. He knows before Sharon says anything beyond hello. There are only so many reasons she would call at three in the morning, and he can hear her grief in only a few syllables.

It seems silly to have this conversation on the phone when she’s only down the hall, so he leaves his apartment and goes to knock on her door. When she opens it, her eyes are red from crying.

“My dad called me on my way home from work. It just occurred to me that I might be the only one of us who has your phone number.” She smiles weakly. “Natasha gave it to me. She was trying to set us up.”

“I know.”

“I don’t think she realized how weird that would be.”

“No,” Steve agrees wryly. “Probably not.”

It is incredibly surreal to be standing in the hallway of their building talking about  _ this _ instead of Peggy.

The thought must occur to Sharon at the same time, because her face flushes and she says, “Come in. I’ll make some coffee.”

Her apartment is like his in layout, and the furniture has the slightly mismatched quality that suggests it was collected over time from yard sales and thrift stores.

“Sorry it’s such a mess. I started my new job this week.”

“Where’d you land?”

Steve’s been reading about the SHIELD redistribution in the papers. He keeps waiting to find out that he’s been redistributed too, but he doubts there’s an agency that wants to take responsibility for the Avengers. He worries about what’s going to happen to them. Even Tony can only bankroll them for so long.

“CIA.”

Steve knows she had to be one of SHIELD’s best agents if they put her right under his nose and he didn’t suspect her, so he’s not remotely surprised the CIA wanted her.

They lean against opposite kitchen countertops while they wait for the coffee to brew.

“I just can’t believe it.” Sharon says softly. “It’s stupid, but I always kind of hoped she’d live forever.”

“Her legacy will,” Steve says, knowing it’s not the same.

Sharon nods, “I know. But that’s not the stuff I’ll miss. Who am I going to call at four in the morning now?”

“You can call me,” Steve offers. “I don’t sleep much.”

“She used to tell us stories about you when we were kids. Superhero stuff. And Uncle Danny told us about you rescuing the 107 th every Christmas.”

“It seems like they had a pretty good life together.”

“Yeah, they did. They were happy.”

“Good. That’s all I ever wanted for her.”

“She wanted the same for you.”

“I know.”

She pours him a cup of coffee and he follows her into the living room. Her couch is on the lumpy side, but still comfortable.

“The funeral is on Friday.”

“Is it all right if I come? I would understand if your family doesn’t want all the media attention.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, of course you should come. She wouldn’t have let you get away with the media circus excuse and neither will I.”

They spend the next few hours swapping stories, although Steve starts to run out of them as the sun rises. He knew Peggy for such a relatively short time, and part of him feels cheated, because he missed sharing this life with her.

Sharon falls asleep just before six, and he covers her with the quilt on the back of the couch before returning to his own apartment to change into shorts and a t-shirt for his run. 

Sam is already circling the reflecting pool when he gets there, and rather than lapping him like he usually does, Steve falls into stride next to him.

“Thought you were going to be a no-show.” Sam says. “You sleep in, or something?”

“Didn’t sleep at all.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Peggy died yesterday.”

Sam slows to a walk, so Steve does the same.

“I’m sorry, man.”

“Thanks.”

“You doing okay?”

“It’s not exactly a surprise. She was ninety-seven.”

“That doesn’t make it easier.”

“She was the last one left who knew me before the serum.”

“What about Bucky?”

“Doesn’t count if he can’t remember.”

“That’s bullshit. You did not drag my ass all over Poland for somebody who doesn’t count.” Sam stops, his hands on his hips. “And you’re an idiot if you think that serum made one ounce of difference to the people who knew and cared about you.”

“I’m losing sight of him,” Steve says. “I’m losing sight of that scrawny kid from Brooklyn who always fought for what was right. I can barely tell right from wrong anymore.”

“That kid wasn’t battle tested.” Sam scoffs. “It’s easy to stand up for what’s right when it’s all black and white. It’s the gray areas that are hard, and your whole damn life is gray areas now. Go run. You’ll feel better. We’ll go for breakfast when you’re done.”

Steve nods. “Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me, you’re buying.”

* * *

Coulson and Fury go into Lugo for supplies the next morning, leaving him and Barton alone, probably because he doesn’t exactly blend in and Barton doesn’t seem to mind babysitting.

“I guess they figure if you were gonna kill me, you would’ve done it by now.” Barton grins as they leave. “I shot first, after all.”

It happens like the flip of a switch. They’re just messing around, sparring because Barton is bored. (For a sniper, his attention span leaves something to be desired.) Barton is no Black Widow when it comes to hand-to-hand, but he’s good. It’s almost  _ fun _ , if that’s something he’s allowed to have anymore, until Barton knocks him on his ass and looms over him, laughing. The world whites out and when Barton holds out a hand to help him up, the Winter Soldier yanks him down.

“What the hell?” Barton says, a panicked edge to his voice. 

“Shut up,” the Winter Soldier snaps, and his fist crunches into Barton’s nose, the metal hand wrapping around Barton’s neck. Barton’s fingers scrabble uselessly on the arm, and his feet kick as he struggles for air.

“Bucky,” Barton gasps. “Bucky, stop.”

It works like a slap across the face, and he blinks rapidly, his hands releasing Barton like he’s on fire. Barton’s nose is bleeding pretty steadily, and there are going to be livid bruises around his neck that match the metal hand. He feels bile rise in his throat and he ducks around the corner of the building to vomit, only to feel clammy and shaky afterwards. He sits heavily on the ground, and stares at nothing.

“Do you know why the shrinks won’t clear me for team stuff?” Barton asks after a few long moments, dropping to the ground next to him.

“No.”

“Two years ago, when everybody else was figuring out how to take down Loki, I was  _ helping _ him. He seeped into my brain and used it like it belonged to him. It was like both of us were in there at the same time, because I can remember it, but he just took over. I couldn’t stop him. I didn’t  _ want _ to stop him. It took Nat bouncing my head off a metal railing to get him out.

“But he was always there as soon as I closed my eyes, sometimes I could feel him standing behind me, breathing on my neck... Around the same time, Phil came back from faking his death and I just sort of...lost it. I couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t, and I trashed a whole wing of New York HQ. The shrinks put me in a padded cell for a while, and then Phil broke me out—I didn’t think we’d ever need all the medical proxy and power of attorney stuff, but thank fuck Phil made me sign it when we got married. I got better, sort of, but there are still times when it’s like Loki is still there. 

“So I get it. It’s not the same, but I know what it’s like to wake up in the morning and not know who you are, or think you’ve got a handle on everything and the tiniest thing sets you off, or to feel like there are two people inside your head.”

“What did you do?” 

“Phil helps me figure it out. If he’s not around, Nat usually is. Really what you need is some kind of anchor, something that grounds you so you can figure out the real stuff from the not real stuff.”

“I don’t have anybody like that.”

“Yeah, you do.”

“Not Steve.”

“I’m not talking about Steve. I’m talking about Bucky Barnes. He’s still in there, somewhere.”

_ Your name is James Buchanan Barnes _ , Steve had said to him, and it had echoed around his head, familiar like déjà vu. 

“My name is James Buchanan Barnes,” he says, feeling it out. It doesn’t sound like him, but at least it doesn’t pinch the way the Winter Soldier does.

“Clinton Francis Barton,” Barton says, back to being a smartass. “I win the middle name game; yours is definitely more embarrassing.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“You and Coulson are married?”

“Yeah. I guess they didn’t give you too many newspapers over the years.”

He shakes his head. “No.”

“God, I’m like the worst guy to fill you in. Phil’s more political, could give you the whole history lesson if you want it, but the short version is that things aren’t perfect anywhere, and there’s still a lot of bullshit, but things are getting better for people like us. And in a few countries we can get married. And you better be cool about this, because I’m not above kicking your ass again.”

“Not necessary.” 

He could say he’s not a hypocrite, but he doesn’t know what he is, really. All he has to go on are a few fuzzy memories of holding Steve Rogers in his arms at night, which isn’t much at all.

“Were you and Steve...?”

“No.” He sighs. “I don’t know.”

Barton shrugs. “You don’t have to have it all worked out. There’s no guidebook for stuff like this.”

He’s honestly not sure if Barton is talking about Steve or his memory. He figures the advice applies to both.

* * *

Friday dawns gray and rainy, and the rain doesn’t let up for Steve’s whole run that morning or his train ride to Falls Church. The sanctuary is packed when he arrives, and he slides into a pew at the back, determined not to become the center of attention at Peggy’s funeral.

Sharon catches his eye, and he half-expects her to wave him forward, but instead she just winks and lets him stay half-hidden behind a pillar. The little girl across the aisle recognizes him, but like the boy at the Smithsonian she nods solemnly when Steve holds a finger to his lips.

Church services always remind him of his mother. The only time she missed a Sunday mass was a weekend he spent in the hospital with bronchitis, and he’s pretty sure she went twice the next weekend to make up for it. Peggy’s service is Presbyterian, not Catholic, but all that really changes is some of the wording. The meaning is the same, as far as he’s concerned.

Peggy’s whole life is here in this church, not just her colleagues and the Army friends who remain, but her children and her grandchildren and her brother and her nieces and it’s a whole life he could’ve shared with her. He doesn’t dwell on it often anymore, but he needs to put that lost life to rest today with Peggy. He can’t spend his entire life chasing ghosts.

After the cemetery, Sharon insists on bringing him back to her parents’ house. Peggy’s family welcomes him in a way that hurts more than it soothes, and he sees her everywhere. Her granddaughter is twenty-four and her spitting image; Sharon and her sisters are as intimidatingly competent as the Peggy he remembers from the war; Peggy’s brother, who must have been just a baby during the war, has the same kind eyes.

He wanders the house and looks at the photographs of a handful of Carter generations, has more food than he’s hungry for pushed on him by Sharon’s mother, and tells a few Howling Commandos stories on request.

“How are you doing?” Sharon asks him when she finds him on the porch after dinner. “We can be...overbearing. That’s how my ex put it, anyway.”

“Not at all. How are you?”

“Sad.” Sharon sighs. “It sounds so inadequate, but I’m just sad.”

“Me, too.”

“I’m glad you came, although Carrie is now going to show up at my apartment on a daily basis to stalk you.”

“Sorry,” he says.

“I’m the one who should apologize; she’s my sister.”

“So is that why SHIELD put you in my building? To keep the stalkers at bay?”

“ _ Your _ building? I lived there for a year before you moved in.”

“That’s some coincidence.”

“I don’t know whether it was a coincidence or not. But Fury ordered me to stay under the radar when you moved in, so I did.”

“You did a good job. I believed you were a nurse, and I’m not an easy guy to fool.”

“I know. They warned me.”

“How did you end up at SHIELD?”

“They recruited me in college. I was pre-law at Georgetown and some guy in a suit handed me his card. It was so clichéd I thought it was a joke. Peggy didn’t want me to do it.”

“Really? That doesn’t sound like her.”

Sharon shrugs. “She didn’t say I shouldn’t, but I could tell. She wanted a different life for me, but this is all I ever wanted, really. How could I not after growing up on stories of how incredible her career was?”

“Your sisters didn’t want that?”

Sharon shakes her head. “No. Carrie thinks I’m stupid and Hannah thinks I’m crazy, and some days I don’t blame them.”

“But you love it.”

“Every second of it. Do you?”

“No.”

“Then why do it?”

It’s the million-dollar question, the one no one can stop asking him. He thinks about Sam, telling him he can do whatever he wants, and Peggy telling him he’ll know what’s right when the time comes, and Natasha suggesting he’s in the wrong business.

“I don’t know how to do anything else,” he shrugs.

“Well, you’re pretty spry for ninety-five. You could probably handle a career change.”

* * *

Coulson gives him a wide berth when he sees the bruises on Barton’s throat. Fury doesn’t.

“What happened there?” he asks, nodding at Barton.

“The Winter Soldier got involved.”

“I figured that much out.” Fury’s face remains frustratingly neutral. “Do you have a handle on this, Sergeant?”

He wants to laugh in Fury’s face. He hasn’t had a handle on anything since 1943, maybe even longer than that. Instead he says, “It helps if you call me Bucky.”

For the briefest second, Fury’s eyebrows rise in surprise. “Is that right?”

“Yeah.” 

He doesn’t know if it will help all that much in the long run. No matter how many of his memories come back, he doubts he’ll ever really feel like Bucky Barnes again, but maybe he’ll feel like a person instead of a weapon. Maybe that will be enough. 

“Oh, cool, we have cell service here. Wherever here is,” Barton says loudly, thumbing at his phone. “Shit, Nat’s texted me like twenty times.”

He angles the phone and shows one of the messages to Coulson, who just shakes his head.

They steal a boat in San Marino and cross the Adriatic into Croatia. He keeps expecting them to split up again, but somewhere along the way Coulson and Fury must have decided against that plan without explaining why. He hasn’t worked in a group since the Commandos, and the clash of familiar and unfamiliar makes his skin itch. Barton, on the other hand, seems to thrive on it.

“D’you think now that SHIELD’s bust, I can be a part of the team again?” He overhears Barton ask Coulson the next night when they’re hunkered down in the basement of a closed restaurant in Rijeka. 

Barton is on watch, and Coulson should be asleep, but Coulson only seems to sleep if Barton does. He wonders what it’s like to care that much.

“You’re assuming the team still exists.” 

“You think Maria is going to let it fall apart?”

“It might not be up to her.”

“Who? Fury?”

“Steve. Maria thinks she can get something set up if Stark is willing to put up the cash and Steve stays on board.”

“Well, we’re good then, right? Steve’s not going to leave the Avengers.”

Coulson shakes his head. “Nat told Maria he has doubts after Insight and Barnes. Peggy Carter dying might be the tipping point.”

“Lugo wasn’t a tactical fuckup, was it? You and Fury planned that and left me out of the loop.” He can hear the anger behind Barton’s words.

“Nick asked us to meet him there and be surprised when we ran into one another. That’s all I knew.”

“You should have told me.” 

“I needed you to be you, without artifice. He would’ve seen straight through it.”

“What’re our orders, then? Fix him so we can deliver him to Steve in one piece? You know better than anybody there’s no fix.” Barton says bitterly.

“We’re not talking about you, here. We’re talking about the Winter Soldier.”

“Don’t. He’s not.”

“He is. He always will be. Our orders are to determine if he can be anybody else.”

“We can’t do that. He deserves better than us deciding if he’s, what,  _ stable _ enough to let him live.”

“Nick has valid concerns.”

“Yeah, he had valid concerns about me, too, but that didn’t stop you breaking me out of the psych ward and bringing me home against orders. Put yourself in Steve’s shoes and you’ll be standing in the same fucking place you were eighteen months ago.”

He feels sick. He’s not a member of this team; he’s not even an asset. He’s the fucking mission. He didn’t know he was programmed to be this  _ stupid _ . He should have seen it coming a mile off, but he was so fucking concerned about Nick Fury trusting him that he never stopped to question if  _ he _ should trust Nick Fury.

His metal fingers twitch, itching to pull his gun and put bullets in each of their skulls. He gets to his feet silently. They don’t notice him moving until it’s too late.


	2. Chapter 2

Steve is watching the Dodgers game (he decided last year the Dodgers are still the Dodgers, Brooklyn or otherwise; especially considering the alternative of rooting for the Mets, or worse, the Yankees) and considering ordering a pizza when someone knocks on his door. He’s half-expecting Sharon, who’s been stopping by more frequently lately, but when he goes to answer the door he finds Natasha standing in his hallway.

“Natasha! Come on in.”

She follows him into the living room, frowning slightly like she’d rather still be in the hallway.

“I didn’t know you were in town.”

“I have a few loose ends to tie up.” Her eyes dart around the apartment, looking for something. 

“You all right?” He asks, “You seem...anxious.”

“Is he here?”

“Who?”

“Barnes.”

“Why would he be here?”

“Because he’s not in Croatia.”

“Croatia?” It takes him far too long to realize the meaning behind Natasha’s words. “Have you known where he is this whole time?”

“Not exactly.”

“Either you did or you didn’t.”

“Nick found him in Poland.”

Steve clenches his jaw. “When?”

“Six weeks ago. They’ve been working together.”

“Working together,” Steve repeats. 

“Yes. They met up with Coulson and Barton in Italy last Thursday. Sunday they crossed into Croatia, and two nights ago Barnes disappeared.”

“Why?”

“They don’t know.”

“Bullshit.”

“If they do know, they didn’t tell me.”

“How long have you known?”

“Since Nick found him.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you would’ve been on the first plane over there. I was protecting you.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“You’re emotionally compromised. If it came down to your life versus his, you wouldn’t be able to pull the trigger.”

“Damn right I wouldn’t.” He scowls. “But I guess that doesn’t matter, because why else would Fury bring Barton in?”

“It’s a moot point with him going AWOL.” Natasha sighs. “Nick didn’t want me to tell you, but I think you need to be prepared.”

“You think he’s going to show up here?”

“Yes. He’s out of options.”

“I can’t just sit here waiting for him to turn up.”

“I’m not saying you should. But you should at least get a heads-up before you come home and find him sitting on your couch. I wouldn’t want you to have a heart attack, old man.”

Steve snorts, his anger starting to ebb. On the one hand, Natasha’s right, it is a moot point. On the other, it’s yet another lie from Fury, but maybe Steve shouldn’t have expected anything to change just because SHIELD collapsed.

“Did Fury say how he is?”

“He said some of it’s coming back, but he also had some kind of flashback and almost killed Barton.” Steve flinches, and Natasha’s expression softens. “It hasn’t even been three months.”

“I know.”

“I can stay, if you want my help.”

Steve shakes his head. “No. I think it has to be me.”

“That’s very honorable, but you aren’t exactly an expert.”

“About him, I am,” Steve says. Natasha doesn’t argue. “I thought it would be years, not weeks, before I saw Bucky again.”

“It’s not going to be Bucky who shows up here,” Natasha says, and something about the cool, detached way she says it makes it seem less awful.

Steve nods, once, and decides to change the subject. “Are you hungry?” he offers. “I was about to order pizza.”

“Pizza sounds great,” Natasha says, shrugging out of her jacket. “No olives, though.”

* * *

The first few days on his own are strange, but by day four he becomes accustomed to his solitary state again. He wonders if he’s always been this adaptable, or if he has HYDRA to thank/blame.

Washington, D.C. is more humid than it was twelve weeks ago, the air thick and stagnant. It feels almost solid in his lungs, and he thinks that maybe this is what Steve felt like trying to breathe when they were kids.

He finds the apartment quickly and breaks in too easily. It’s the middle of the day, and it’s empty. Someone has spackled over the bullet holes in the wall, and there are no traces of blood left on the hardwood floors or any of the furniture.

The whole thing is obsessively tidy: shoes lined up neatly by the door, books alphabetized on the shelf, records organized by genre then singer, a basket on the coffee table for the TV remote, the kitchen countertops gleam, there isn’t a single smudge on the bathroom mirror, and the bed is made with hospital corners. 

He’s not sure what, exactly, he’s searching for until he finds it, in a frame on the desk in the little room next to the bedroom. A drawing, one of Steve’s, so not as reliable as a photo but they didn’t exactly have any friends with a camera then. Even in the frame he can see the creases from decades spent folded into quarters. Their arms are flung over each other’s shoulders, their faces split in wide grins. They can’t be more than sixteen, and the Coney Island Wonder Wheel looms behind them. 

He doesn’t remember it, exactly. Most of the memories from before the war are more dreamlike than anything; too hazy to be reliable. Still, at least they aren’t the nightmarish ones that belong to the Winter Soldier. 

He puts the picture back down, makes his way to the kitchen, and sits down at the table. It’s too much like waiting for Pierce, though, so he moves to the sofa instead. Then, it feels strange and unnatural to be sitting on the squashy leather sofa and he’s not sure what to do with his arms or his legs so he moves back to the kitchen table so he can at least put his elbows on the table and his feet on the floor.

Really he’d like to sit out on the fire escape and wait from a distance, but if he does that he’ll never actually come inside, he’ll just spend the rest of his life watching Steve from outside the window.

The clock ticks too loudly, and he watches the hands move around the face for almost forty-five minutes. Waiting is his game. He’s good at it. He could probably sit here and wait for Steve to come home for days.

The waiting is the easy part, after all.

It’s seven fifty-four when he hears keys in the lock and the door swings open. Steve is wearing jeans and a t-shirt and carrying a plastic bag that smells like takeout. Chinese, maybe. 

Steve kicks off his shoes and moves towards the kitchen. He flips on the light and jumps a little when he notices Bucky. He sets the bag of food down carefully, like he’s afraid to move too quickly. Like he walked into his kitchen and found himself face to face with a jungle cat. 

“Hey,” Steve says, his expression a strange, neutral thing that looks nothing like the Steve he supposedly remembers. 

“Hey,” he says back, his voice weak and his throat dry.

Steve stares at him for a long minute, the clock still ticking too loudly and the low hum of the refrigerator the only noises in the apartment. Then, “Are you hungry?”

The question is so mundane it’s almost surreal. “Yeah,” he says, surprising them both.

Steve nods. He pulls forks out of a drawer and takes down two plates from one of the open shelves on the wall. 

They sit across the table from each other with plastic containers spread out between them. It’s Thai food, not Chinese, and Steve crosses something off in a little notebook before he starts piling food on his plate.

They eat in silence. Food has been nothing but fuel for as long as he can remember; it’s strange to eat something and pay attention to how it smells and tastes and feels, and whether or not he likes it, so he doesn’t. He focuses on Steve instead. The Steve sitting across from him is too big to fit into the space Steve takes up in Bucky’s memories. That Steve is asthmatic and small and tucks perfectly under Bucky’s arm. 

“You don’t want me here,” he says after he’s eaten some and pushed the rest around his plate for several minutes. 

“Yes, I do,” Steve insists. 

“Bucky Barnes doesn’t exist anymore. Not how you want him to.”

Steve frowns and sets down his fork. “I don’t have an agenda. You’re alive. That’s what counts.”

“Don’t be naïve.” He sneers. “I would’ve been better off dead.”

“Maybe,” Steve says. “But you’re not. And  _ you _ came here.”

He has no answer for that. How could he? Where the hell else was he going to end up?

Steve’s phone starts ringing somewhere in the apartment, an annoying trill that makes Steve frown.

“Answer it.”

Steve nods, and goes to where it’s plugged in on the hall table. 

“Tony,” he says, his tone clipped.

Sometime in the nineties, HYDRA upgraded the Winter Soldier’s hearing. He doesn’t even have to strain to listen to the conversation. 

“I’m starting to get a little offended, Cap,” says the man on the phone, his tone flippant but his words true. “People haven’t screened my calls since...ever.”

“I seriously doubt that.”

“Come to New York.”

“I will. Eventually.”

“Listen, Pepper got drinks with Hill last week and it sounds like there’s something in the works to patch everything up, but we really need you on board.”

“And you drew the short stick to bring me in?” 

“Nah, I’m pretty sure Fury is working on some plan to win you back, but you’ve come over to the dark side where we don’t trust the government. Also, we have cookies.” Tony pauses for a beat. “Did you understand that reference?”

“What do you  _ want _ , Tony?”

“I’ll send you a link to explain the cookies thing. Anyway, I’m just saying if we all don’t want to be working for SHIELD two-point-oh, which I’m figuring you don’t, we need to work together. Thor’s flying in and Natasha’s going to represent Barton since he’s fucked off somewhere again, and the rest of us are already here.”

Steve sighs. “When?”

“ASAP. Well, next weekend. Pepper is in Malibu this week, and we need her at this thing.”

“I’ll think about it. I’ll Skype in if I can’t get there.”

“Captain America just used Skype as a verb. I’m tweeting that.”

“Good night, Tony.” Steve hangs up, “Sorry.”

“I was Fury’s plan.”

“I know you were working together.”

“No.” He shakes his head. “I was his  _ mission _ .”

Steve’s jaw clenches for a moment, a muscle jumping in his cheek, but he doesn’t look surprised. 

“You knew.”

“No,” Steve says, his voice breaking. “No, if I had known...” He trails off; any of his threats would be empty ones. Steve has never had the stomach for self-serving revenge. He starts gathering the takeout containers, closing them up and moving them to the refrigerator, everything calculated and cautious. The tense set of his shoulders suggests he’d rather throw them across the room. 

“Do you want a shower?” Steve offers and he finds himself nodding automatically, the draw of a real shower too strong to resist.

He can count the number of hot showers he remembers on one hand. He stays under the spray and scrubs until the water that swirls down the drain is clean instead of almost opaque with grime. 

When he emerges from the shower, the mirror is fogged over but he swipes at it with the towel to stare at his reflection. His eyes are sunken hollows, dark circles beneath, and his hair hangs almost to his shoulders. The join where metal meets skin is puckered and angry red, like it never fully healed. Three weeks’ growth of beard obscures his jaw; he hasn’t shaved since London, in the safe house. 

Mechanically, he finds a razor and shaving cream in the cabinet behind the mirror and lathers his face. It doesn’t occur to him until he’s done that he probably should have asked Steve first. The Winter Soldier just takes what he needs.

The clothes Steve set out for him are soft and too big, the t-shirt hanging off his shoulders and the sweatpants nearly falling down until he knots the drawstring tighter. Clean-shaven, gaunt and drowning in Steve’s t-shirt, he looks harmless.

If only. 

* * *

Steve spends three nights expecting to find Bucky gone in the morning. It doesn’t exactly help his insomnia. Tony sends him texts almost hourly about coming to New York, at least for the weekend, and he doesn’t know how to say he can’t.

“You should.” Bucky says, on Thursday morning. “They need you.”

_ You need me more _ , Steve thinks, eyeing the way Bucky hunches in the shirt Steve loaned him, occupying the smallest possible amount of space on Steve’s couch.

It’s not right. It’s not who Bucky is. Bucky was larger than life, always. He never walked on eggshells or shirked away from anything. He’s used to Bucky sprawling all over him and everything he owns, because from the time they were six years old there was no seam where Steve ended and Bucky began. They used to  _ breathe _ together.

“Come with me.” Steve says.

Bucky shakes his head. “No.”

“It will be fine.”

“I killed his parents.” Bucky snaps. “Howard and Maria Stark. Made it look like a car accident.”

Steve mouth goes dry. He entertains, just for a second, the idea of bringing the man who killed Tony’s parents into Tony’s home, and doesn’t see how it could end in anything short of bloodshed.

“Bucky—

“Isn’t it time for your run?” Bucky interrupts.

It was time for Steve’s run hours ago, but it’s not like the Mall is going anywhere. He feels a stab of guilt, thinking of Sam running laps alone because Steve can’t figure out how to be two versions of himself at the same time.

“Yeah,” Steve says, taking the out because he needs air and Bucky needs space.

He arrives at the VA just in time for Sam’s group to start. For the first time, he slips into a chair at the back. Sam catches his eye and frowns, concerned, but Steve waves him off. He doesn’t share, because he can’t break Bucky’s confidence and he doesn’t have the words yet to talk about himself. Still, he listens, and wonders idly why he’s waited this long to turn up. The generation gap doesn’t matter here; on the most basic level they’re all struggling with the same things. 

“You okay?” Sam asks him afterwards, while they walk out onto the sidewalk together.

“He’s back. He showed up a few days ago.”

“Bucky?”

“Yeah.”

“How is he?”

“Not who he was when I...before. I knew he wouldn’t be. I knew. But...”

“Knowing it and seeing it are different.” Sam supplies.

“Yeah.” 

“Is he dangerous?”

“What kind of question is that? Of course he’s dangerous. He’s the Winter Soldier.”

“Sorry. I mean is he a danger to you?”

“He hasn’t tried to hurt me.” 

“I know I’m not asking the fun questions here, Steve, but I’m trying to help.”

“I know,” Steve swallows hard around a sudden lump in his throat. The weight of all of this—of losing Bucky and finding the Winter Soldier—is heavy on his shoulders. “I’m sorry. I’m just kind of...drowning here. I love him. I’ve loved him since we were kids and I don’t know what to do because I want to help him and I can’t. I don’t know how.”

Steve is crying, hard, before he even really realizes it’s happening. Sam pulls him into a hug, and Steve stands on the sidewalk in front of the VA sobbing into Sam’s shoulder for the better part of ten minutes.

“It’s good to know you’re human,” Sam says. “I was starting to wonder.”

Steve laughs, watery and garbled. “Sorry.”

“You definitely don’t need to apologize. I can probably sell this Captain America snot t-shirt on eBay for, like, five hundred bucks. More than that, if you autograph it too.”

“That’s insane. And gross.”

“Where is he now?”

“At my place. He needed some space. We both did, I guess.”

“That’s not surprising. It’s a lot to process.”

“I didn’t think it would be like this.”

“Like what?”

“Like he’s a total stranger. Everything is different.”

“Are you the same person you were then?” Sam asks, but he already knows the answer. 

“It’s not the same.”

“No,” Sam agrees. “You chose it. He didn’t.”

Steve inhales sharply. 

“Look, I’m not trying to give you a guilt trip.” Sam says, shifting his weight between his feet. “Under the circumstances, you’re handling this like a champ. Just remember that whatever you’re going through, he’s going through ten times worse.”

“I know. It’s just so much harder than I thought.”

“You wanna get some food?” Sam offers. “Or go for a run?”

Steve shakes his head, “No. I should get back.”

“Anything you need, just call.” Sam says.

Steve nods. “I will. Thank you.”

Steve’s come home to an empty apartment enough times now to know that Bucky is somewhere inside when he opens the door. He finds him frowning at the TV, the volume turned low. Steve recognizes the familiar patter of a sports announcer, baseball probably.

“Who’s playing?” Steve asks, mostly to announce his presence. Not that he thinks the Winter Soldier would have missed him unlocking the door, but he’s not going to take any chances and accidentally sneak up on him either. 

“Who the fuck are the Los Angeles Dodgers?” He sounds so outraged, so much like Steve’s Bucky that Steve can’t help grinning.

“Old news, unfortunately. They’ve been in L.A. since ’57.”

“That’s bullshit. I won’t be a Yankees fan.”

It’s the bottom of the sixth, and the Rockies are up by three. It’s actually a replay of last week’s game, Steve realizes, but he isn’t going to complain. Not when this feels almost normal.

“You didn’t run.” It sounds hollow, mechanical. Not Bucky.

“No.” Steve says. “I went to a VA meeting instead. My friend Sam works there.”

“What kind of meeting?” Bucky frowns.

“Support group, I guess. Soldiers readjusting to civilian life.”

“You’re not a civilian or a soldier.”

“Not anymore,” Steve agrees. “But that doesn’t stop it helping some.”

The corners of Bucky’s mouth twitch downward into a brief frown, but he doesn’t say anything.

“You still like eggs for dinner?” Steve asks. “I was gonna make myself an omelet.”

“I don’t know,” Bucky says.

“Wanna try?” Steve suggests.

For a long moment, Bucky doesn’t say anything, just eyes Steve cautiously. Then, “Okay.”

Bucky sits watching the baseball game while Steve busies himself with dinner. He’s just pouring the eggs for the first omelet into the frying pan when he glances up to see Bucky leaning against the kitchen door frame. He hadn’t noticed him move, and Steve just barely manages to keep from visibly startling.

“I remember this,” Bucky says quietly. 

“Eggs?” Steve frowns.

“You.” Bucky shakes his head. “Trying to take care of me.”

“That’s what we did,” he says. “We took care of each other.”

“Why?”

Steve doesn’t know why that makes it hard to breathe, but it does, like Bucky squeezed him around the throat instead. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t understand what we were to each other.” Bucky frowns, but he’s not angry. Even now, Steve still can read all of his expressions. He’s confused, and Steve wishes he had an easy answer. Or any answer at all.

He goes for honesty. “I’m not sure I do either, Buck. We never really talked about it.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“You didn’t ask a question.”

Bucky makes a frustrated noise in the back of his throat. “Were we lovers?” 

“No.” Steve says, and disappointment flickers across Bucky’s face.

“I thought—” His face flushes. “We shared a bed.”

Steve nods. “Yeah, we had a terrible apartment. I was sick all the time, and we shared a bed most nights or I would’ve probably frozen to death.”

“So it was just...practical?” Bucky asks, looking ready to set the matter aside. 

“God, Bucky,  _ no _ ,” Steve chokes out. He doesn’t know why this is the moment, standing here in his kitchen making eggs, but for some reason it is. “We were never lovers, but that wasn’t because we didn’t love each other. We just never fucking did anything about it.”

“Why not?” Bucky demands.

“I don’t know.” Steve says. There were so many times it could’ve happened,  _ should’ve _ even, but something always stopped them. “I think maybe we thought there would be more time.”

Bucky snorts. “Well, we weren’t wrong, exactly.”

Steve turns his attention to the eggs, because he’s pretty sure looking at Bucky is going to make him try something stupid, and when he looks back the moment is broken and Bucky’s expression is the Winter Soldier’s, flat and neutral. 

He finishes the omelets and butters toast, and they eat in front of the TV watching the end of the game. The rest of the night is quiet, and around nine Bucky stands and announces he’s going for a walk.

“Do you want company?” Steve offers.

Bucky looks at him and shrugs. It’s not a no, so Steve gets to his feet and goes to find his shoes.

They don’t talk. Steve lets Bucky lead the way, just walks beside him, their shoulders sometimes brushing together as they move aside for other people on the sidewalk. A few people double-take as they pass by Steve, but nobody stops them, or tries to take his picture. Steve’s pretty sure Bucky would bolt if that happened.

By the time they reach the Mall, it’s late, and there’s almost no one there except them. Steve likes the Mall at night. The monuments seem so dignified, warmly lit with Lincoln looking out across them solemnly. 

“This is where you run?” Bucky frowns.

“Yeah,” Steve nods. Usually down by the reflecting pool.”

“Do you wear your Captain America uniform while you do? Take a break to sign autographs, pose for pictures?” 

“What?”

“Most people join a gym, or run in their neighborhood.”

“How would you know?” Steve asks, without thinking, because he  _ knows _ this Bucky. This is the Bucky who laughed until he cried when he saw one of the early Captain America films while they were on leave in London, the Bucky who could never really call Steve Captain with a straight face.

“Hey, you’re the one who missed seventy years, not me. I got unfrozen once and awhile, at least.”

“It’s a nice place to run.”

“SHIELD told you to do it, didn’t they?”

Steve sighs. It’s not wholly inaccurate, but the Mall was also convenient to the Triskelion before he crashed a helicarrier into it.

“They did!” Bucky crows gleefully. “They wanted the perfect photo op, probably publicity for that stupid Smithsonian exhibit—here we see Captain America, doing his daily penance by jogging around the World War II memorial.”

“That exhibit is terrible, isn’t it?” Steve groans. “Imagine what Dum Dum and the others would say.”

“They wouldn’t say anything, they’d be laughing too hard. Mostly at you, for agreeing to it.”

“Nobody asked my permission,” Steve shrugs. “They told me it was happening. They didn’t tell me how much of my personal life was going to make it into the exhibit.”

“What personal life?” Bucky jokes. Then, he smiles softly, the smile he used to give to girls like Betty Wilson when he took them out dancing. “Your mom would’ve liked it, though.”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees. “She would.”

By the time they finish their meandering walk back to Steve’s apartment, the sun is starting to rise and Steve is supposed to be leaving for New York in a few hours. 

Steve pauses in the doorway of his bedroom to look at Bucky, already stretched out on the couch, yawning widely. 

“We were afraid,” he says.

Bucky frowns. “What?”

“Nothing ever happened between us because we were afraid.”

* * *

Steve goes to New York, and Bucky spends the entire weekend wandering around D.C., glad it’s cool enough now to wear a jacket and keep a cap pulled low over his face. Maybe because they talked about it on Thursday night, Bucky can’t get the Smithsonian exhibit out of his head, and when he sees a Metro advertisement telling him it closes next month, he decides to go again.

It’s crowded this time, because it’s a weekend, and because Bucky walks in like a normal visitor instead of breaking in overnight. 

It’s strange, staring at his photo and  _ knowing _ it’s him this time. Maybe stranger than it was to look at it and think it was merely a coincidence or a HYDRA trick that he and James Buchanan Barnes have the same face.

He watches Peggy Carter talk about Steve’s bravery and remembers, suddenly, what he overheard Coulson say in that basement in Croatia. It hadn’t registered at the time, he was too angry with himself for not being able to spot the obvious, but now it does. Peggy is dead. Not dead like the others, the way Dum Dum and Jim and Gabe have been for years now, but recently. She was alive when Steve woke from the ice; she was alive until only a few weeks ago. 

And Steve hasn’t said anything. 

He doesn’t remember much about Peggy. He didn’t know her long enough or well enough, but he does remember the first night he met her. She was wearing a red dress, and Steve had looked at her the way he wasn’t allowed to look at Bucky, and Bucky had bloodied his knuckles on the brick wall of the pub when he’d escaped to the alleyway where he wouldn’t have to watch Steve watch Peggy. He thinks there was even a scar, but he doesn’t have the hand to prove it anymore.

Steve’s words have been echoing around his head.  _ We were afraid _ . He doesn’t remember fear, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. He’s not sure he could recognize it now anyway; HYDRA programmed him not to feel afraid.

It’s after midnight on Sunday when Steve gets back, but Bucky’s not asleep. He’s only staring at the ceiling, watching shadows and headlights move across it. He wasn’t waiting up for Steve, exactly, but he also knew he wasn’t going to fall asleep before Steve came home.

Steve drops his duffel with a heavy thud by the door. Bucky hears him sigh deeply and he can picture it without having to peer over the top of the couch: Steve leaning against the door, his head tipped back, eyes closed, chest rising and falling steadily.

Bucky swallows thickly. He wants to get up from the couch, to go meet Steve in the doorway and wrap him up in his arms. Except only one of his arms is Bucky’s, and he doubts Steve wants a hug from the Winter Soldier.

“Buck? Are you awake?” Steve asks, barely above a whisper. 

For a second, he considers pretending otherwise. “Yes,” he says instead, his voice hoarse from speaking to no one for the past two days.

He sits up, and watches in the orange glow cast from a streetlight as Steve kicks off his shoes and comes to sit at the end of the couch Bucky’s feet have just vacated. He slouches into it, actually, his whole body deflating with exhaustion.

“You look terrible.”

“I feel terrible,” Steve agrees. “Tony tends to have that effect on people.”

“I take it it wasn’t a productive weekend, then?”

Steve shrugs. “I didn’t really expect it to be. Tony’s plans are usually a little half-baked.”

There’s something almost…fond in Steve’s voice, and there’s no mistaking the jealousy that spikes through him. 

“How was your weekend?” Steve tips his head sideways on the couch, his tired eyes finding Bucky’s in the dark.

It’s his turn to shrug. “All right. Quiet. Mostly just walked around. Visited your exhibit again. Why haven’t you said anything about Peggy?”

“Oh,” Steve says, surprised. “Honestly, I wasn’t sure if you’d remember her.”

“Only a little. London, red dress, you looking at her like you wanted nothing more than to get her  _ out _ of the red dress.”

It’s hard to tell in the dim room, but he’s pretty sure Steve is blushing. 

“It wasn’t like that.” 

“Bullshit.”

“It wasn’t.” Steve says, more insistent. “It could’ve been, maybe. But—

“You thought you’d have more time, right?” He says, mean for the sake of it, mean because the idea of Steve with Peggy makes his skin crawl even though he knows he has no right to feel it, maybe  _ because  _ he has no right.

Steve flinches. “No, actually. I figured we wouldn’t ever have any.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, the words foreign in his mouth. When was the last time he apologized for anything? 

“For what?” Steve snipes back. “That she’s dead, or that you’re being an asshole?”

“Both.”

“Well, that’s something, I guess,” Steve says heavily, and drags a hand over his exhausted face. Neither of them says anything for long enough that Bucky’s about to check whether Steve’s fallen asleep when Steve says, “I went to our old apartment this morning. I’d never been back, I was curious to see if it was still there. Do you remember it?”

He remembers  _ Steve _ in their old apartment, is flooded with the images as soon as Steve asks him. He doesn’t remember the address, or who their neighbors were, doesn’t particularly care what it looked like. He only remembers Steve, bundled up in three sweaters in winter and sweating through an undershirt in summer. Steve standing at the stove making eggs. Steve sitting by the window in the early mornings, drawing. Steve coming home from whatever shitty job he was working, always tired but grinning ear to ear to find Bucky home already, burning dinner.

“I remember the heat never worked,” he says instead.

“It’s a Starbucks now.”

“Isn’t everything?” 

Steve huffs a laugh at that. “Yeah, seems like, doesn’t it?”

Steve yawns, and Bucky nudges him with his foot. “Go to sleep. You can tell me about New York in the morning.”

Steve nods, and gets to his feet. “Night, Buck.”

“Night, Steve.”

* * *

Steve wakes suddenly. The clock on his bedside table reads three-thirty, so he’s only been asleep for a couple hours. For a long moment, he strains to listen to the still apartment, wondering what woke him. Then, he hears it, the faint susurrus of breath somewhere in his room and adrenaline starts to race through him. He squints into the corners, his heart thumping in his ears. He’s about to reach for the shield he always keeps right below the bed when he catches the glint of the streetlight off of Bucky’s metal arm.

“Jesus,” he breathes out, “you startled me, Buck.”

Steve reaches for the light next to him. “Don’t,” Bucky says harshly, and Steve stops.

As his eyes adjust to the darkness, he gets a better view of Bucky, standing in the doorway. He’s shirtless, pajamas borrowed from Steve riding low on his hips. Steve suddenly wishes Bucky would let him turn on the light for entirely different reasons, because he hasn’t seen Bucky like this since before the war and he’s greedy for it. When they lived together Bucky was almost always half-dressed in a lazy effort to do laundry less frequently, and Steve used to be able to draw Bucky like this from memory. (Who is he kidding? He still  _ can _ , but only the Bucky from then. From before.)

“I can’t hear you breathing from out there.” Bucky says finally. “I don’t really sleep if I can’t.”

Sometimes he wakes up certain he can feel Bucky’s hand on his chest, like muscle memory, like his body knows something is missing better than his brain does.

“C’mere,” Steve says, pulling back the covers and sliding over to make room. 

Bucky hesitates for a second before stepping over the threshold and crossing to the bed. Steve finds himself holding his breath as Bucky slips beneath the quilt, certain any noise will break this spell and send Bucky hurrying back to the couch.

Bucky curls onto his right side, hand tucked beneath the pillow. Without thinking, Steve reaches for Bucky’s left hand, catching him by the wrist, feeling cool metal instead of warm skin and Bucky goes rigid next to him. Steve almost lets go, but knows that would only make things worse. He puts the Winter Soldier’s hand where it belongs, on his chest, just below his sternum.

“You used to do this,” Steve whispers.

“Yeah.” Bucky says roughly. “I remember.”

They lay together silently for a long moment before Steve asks, “When did you remember this?”

“I never forgot it,” Bucky says. “Even when I didn’t remember me, I remembered you.”

Something breaks in Steve then, the last piece of the dam against the flood of his feelings.

“Buck,” he says, his voice rough, and he’s turning to get closer to Bucky before he can think about whether it’s a good idea. “Can I,” he starts to ask, but Bucky’s lips are on his before he can finish, his mouth soft and gentle against Steve’s.

Bucky’s metal hand fists in his t-shirt, hauling him close. His tongue drags against Steve’s slow and filthy, and Steve twists to pull Bucky on top of him. He’s ninety-six or twenty-six depending on how you do the math, but either way he’s never felt like this, didn’t know he  _ could  _ feel like this.

Bucky kisses exactly like Steve’s always imagined he would: like they’ve got all the time in the world, like he wants to make this last forever. 

Steve grins against Bucky’s mouth, lets his hands roam across the bare skin of Bucky’s back, soft and warm to his touch. Bucky flinches when Steve’s hand curls around his metal shoulder, his fingertips brushing the knot of scars along the seam. 

“Sorry,” he says automatically, and Bucky shakes his head.

“Just startled me. This is unfair, though.”

“What is?”

“Shirt.” Bucky grins, sitting up and tugging at the hem of Steve’s. Steve sits up too, puts his arms up so Bucky can pull his shirt over his head. Bucky tosses it aside and grins wolfishly. 

“What?” Steve asks, but Bucky just leans in to kiss him again, more heat behind it this time, maybe even a hint of urgency. Steve curls his hands around Bucky’s hips and pulls him closer, although Steve’s pretty sure it’s never going to feel like Bucky is close enough, would pull Bucky  _ under his skin _ if he could.

Bucky pushes him back down onto the bed, trails kisses down his neck and sucks a mark onto Steve’s collarbone and Steve wonders if it will last longer than a few hours. His bruises usually don’t. They both laugh when Bucky finds a ticklish spot just below Steve’s heart that makes him squirm. 

“Pants,” Steve says, his fingers already hooked in the waistband of Bucky’s.

Bucky smirks. “Now you’re getting the hang of it.”

There’s nothing like being pressed skin to skin, Steve realizes, and arches up, seeking… _ more _ . More warmth, more friction, more Bucky. This always seemed impossible for them, always just out of reach, even when they were at each other’s side constantly. He broke his heart over Bucky more times than he cares to remember, wishing for something he knew he could have if he only asked, but too chickenshit to actually  _ ask _ . He’d convinced himself it was a noble sacrifice, but it had really only been cowardice.

Bucky bites another mark near Steve’s hip, and Steve twists his hand into Bucky’s hair, pleasure thrumming through him at the sound of Bucky’s groan, Bucky’s warm breath on his cock. Steve shudders when Bucky curls his hand around him, light and teasing. Of course he teases,  _ of course _ , but before Steve can needle him about it, Bucky takes him into his mouth, and all Steve knows is wet heat and Bucky’s tongue. 

Steve chokes, surprised, and grips Bucky’s hair tighter. He  _ feels _ Bucky’s answering hum and it takes all he has not to thrust deeper into Bucky’s mouth. Bucky eases off, a grin on his face, still teasing because teasing Steve is what he does best.

“I haven’t done this before,” Steve blurts, his voice too loud.

“With a guy?” Bucky asks, sounding distracted, and, well, it’s not like Steve can blame him. 

“With anyone.” 

Bucky stills, and Steve wishes he hadn’t spoken, because  _ stopping _ was nowhere on his mind. 

“How?” Bucky asks and Steve feels his ears warm with embarrassment. It must show on his face, because Bucky shakes his head. “Not like that. I just mean...why not?”

Steve thinks of his Catholic mother, and the way he’d never been very good at any of this, and how all the girls they took on dates always ended up wanting Bucky anyway, and the war, and Peggy, and, and, and...all of those are true but none of them are the real reason.

“Because it was only ever you I wanted.”

“God, Steve.” For a second, Bucky’s face crumples like he might cry. Then he’s crawling back up Steve’s body to kiss him again, his hands curled around Steve’s face gently, like it’s precious, like he’s afraid Steve might break.

“I’ve wanted you so long,” Bucky says. “Taking all those girls on double dates was just an excuse to sit across a table from you, pretend it was something we could have.”

“I know,” Steve says, although he hadn’t. He should’ve. The girls only ever lasted long enough for Bucky to spin them around the dance floor; he always walked home with his arm around Steve’s shoulders, almost always fell asleep next to Steve. “We can have it now.”

Bucky looks ready to argue (Captain America, Winter Soldier, the definition of star-crossed), but Steve frowns. “Please, Buck.”

“Yeah, okay.” Bucky agrees. “Okay.”

It’s softer, after that. Bucky doesn’t tease, and Steve wonders why they waited so long, could kick both of them for the years they wasted thinking this was something they could live without. Bucky has always been a part of him—more than that, Bucky has always been  _ half _ of him, ever since they were kids, too young to even understand what it meant. Even so, it’s different, like this, Bucky on top of him and around him and inside him and he thinks maybe Bucky is really more than half of him. Bucky is him and he is Bucky and how could anything else matter?

“I love you,” Bucky says in his ear, shaking and spent. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

* * *

The room is blindingly bright when he wakes, the light pressing insistently on his eyelids. He groans, and rolls to turn his back to the window, brushing up against something warm and solid. He opens one eye against the morning glare, just enough to see him.

Steve.

His face is relaxed in sleep, his mouth hanging slightly open and his eyes moving rapidly enough beneath his eyelids to assure him that he is indeed asleep, not pretending. He is vulnerable, and it would be so easy. So easy to break his neck, or smother him with a pillow, or bash his skull in with the shield under the bed. 

Even as he thinks it, Bucky wrenches himself upright so quickly that Steve startles awake and reaches for the shield. He sets it down with a soft thunk when he realizes there’s nobody attacking them.

“Buck?” Steve asks cautiously, and Bucky knows what he must look like, hunched over in the bed, panting like he just finished running a marathon and gripping the sheets tightly enough that he thinks he might rip them.

“C’mere,” Steve says, his voice rough from sleep. He tugs gently on Bucky’s shoulder, pulling him back down. Steve lets him tuck his face into his neck and rubs soothing circles on his back. 

He inhales deeply—Steve smells like sweat and sex and god Bucky loves him. 

“I’m still him.” 

“The Winter Soldier?”

“Yes.”

“Did you think you wouldn’t be? I mean, the sex was great but it was my first time, so I don’t think I’m up to erasing seventy years of brainwashing yet. We can definitely keep trying though.”

“That’s not funny, Steve.”

“I thought it was.” Steve shrugs.

“You don’t get it.” Bucky snaps. “My first thought just now was how easy it would be to kill you.”

Frustratingly, Steve doesn’t even flinch. He’s supposed to be appalled and disgusted and  _ afraid _ . He’s not supposed to Captain America his way through this with a stubborn set to his jaw and his usual disregard for his own safety.

“It wouldn’t be easy, Bucky.” He says. “If it was, the Winter Soldier would’ve done it a hundred times over by now.”

“Stop. The Winter Soldier isn’t some other guy, something separate. There’s just  _ me. _ ”

It takes everything he has to admit it, to acknowledge that the distance he’s been keeping between the Winter Soldier and James Buchanan Barnes doesn’t fucking exist. He feels lighter for just saying it, like he’s being carried with the current instead of fighting it, but somehow it’s worse too.

Because he was right, however many weeks that feel like years ago when he told Fury that there’s no fix. 

There’s just him. 

He glances at Steve, bracing himself for disappointment or some kind of argument, at the very least. But Steve only shrugs. “Okay.”

“Okay?” He repeats, dumbly.

“Yeah.” Steve says. “We’ll figure it out.”

“Steve—

“Buck, I’ve been in love with you since we were kids. The day you fell was the worst day of my life. Literally nothing is going to stop me from finding a way to make this work.”

“I don’t think it’s that easy.”

“I didn’t say it would be easy.” Steve sighs. “And I think we’re going to need help.”

Steve makes eggs. Scrambled this time, although he has to make two batches because the first one burns when Bucky crowds him against the counter and kisses him good morning. And a few hundred other mornings, for good measure or lost time or both. 

They’re finishing breakfast when the first knock comes, and Steve shoots him a reassuring look before going to answer the door. 

Bucky recognizes the redhead from twelve weeks ago, and from Odessa, and from the Red Room, and he wonders which version of her he’s supposed to greet. She decides for him, saying hello in Russian.

“Natalia,” he says, and Steve blinks.

“Odessa?” Steve demands, arms crossed over his chest.

“Russia, before that.” Natalia shrugs.

Steve sighs heavily. “You should’ve told me.”

“The truth—

“Isn’t all things to all people, I know,” Steve says.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“No, you’re not.” Steve scowls, but he doesn’t turn it into a thing. Just offers her eggs, which she turns down, and coffee, which she accepts. 

Sam Wilson arrives next, and shakes Bucky’s hand like Bucky hasn’t tried to kill him at least twice.

“We waiting on anyone else?” Sam asks.

“No,” Steve says.

“Yes.” Bucky says.

Steve frowns. “Who?”

“I called someone.” Bucky sighs. Steve’s not going to like this. “Fury.”

“Buck, we’re trying  _ not  _ to turn you into a government asset again,” Steve says through gritted teeth.

“I know. He’s not coming. He’s just sending help.”

The third knock comes perfectly on cue. Steve sighs, resigned, and goes to answer the door again.

“Aren’t you supposed to be dead?” Bucky hears him ask, deadpan just two degrees shy of rude. He’d forgotten Steve could sound like that; it was his favorite tone for mouthing off in school, to bullies and teachers alike, and later to army brass he didn’t agree with, the sort of tone that tricked you into thinking he was joking for about five seconds longer than it took to insult you. 

“You mean that’s not the theme of this party?” 

“Clint?”

“Nat!”

“By all means, let’s have this highly sensitive meeting on Rogers’ doormat.”

Agent Coulson, as usual, looks irritated and immaculate in his suit. Barton is in a purple hoodie and grins when he spots Bucky. 

“Hey there, Buchanan.”

“Francis.” Bucky shoots back.

“Yeah, we’ve already established Buchanan is worse.”

“Says you.”

Simultaneously, Steve and Coulson let out long-suffering sighs, before Steve goes to grab a couple more chairs and then they’re all crowding around the table. Steve introduces Sam to Clint and Coulson while they pass the coffee carafe around. 

“Thanks for coming,” Steve says. “We called because we—

“ _ I _ ,” Bucky interrupts, “need help.”

“Oh, you  _ both _ definitely need help, considering you’re harboring a fugitive down the hall from a CIA agent,” Coulson says brusquely. 

“I trust Sharon.”

“Unless you can trust the entire agency—which you can’t—then no, you don’t.” Coulson shakes his head. “The first order of business has to be getting out of D.C. Call Stark. The Tower is about the best we can do, under the circumstances.”

“Shouldn’t the first order of business be a lawyer?” Steve asks. 

“No.” Natasha shakes her head. “He doesn’t stand a chance in court, not in this political climate.”

“So, what? He grows a beard and gets a haircut and wears long sleeves for the rest of his life? That doesn’t sound super realistic,” Sam says, and Bucky nods his agreement. 

“How many people, besides us here, know who he is?” Clint asks.

“Fury,” Natasha says. “Hill. Tony…so probably Pepper too.”

“Maybe Sharon.”

“Maybe?” Clint says.

“Peggy knew. I can’t be sure whether she told Sharon, and I can’t ask Sharon without basically telling her.”

“Maybe we bring her in,” Clint suggests. “Because I think we’re going to need somebody inside the CIA anyway.”

“For what?” Bucky frowns.

Clint grins. “Let’s Face/Off it.”

Natasha rolls her eyes. “Clint,  _ I _ don’t even get that reference, so these relics definitely don’t.”

“An FBI agent assumes the identity of the terrorist he’s hunting in order to capture him through a deeply flawed face-transplant concept.”

“Yeah, that still isn’t making sense,” Sam laughs. 

“Right now, everybody’s out there looking for the Winter Soldier. So we definitely  _ don’t _ find the Winter Soldier, we find Captain America’s long-lost…however you guys wanna play it, I vote lover for maximum sympathy points, but best friend will work too. Anyway, we find Bucky Barnes, who’s been a POW since 1940-whatever, held captive by HYDRA, used as a guinea pig for their version of the supersoldier serum, missing an arm—I’m assuming that thing comes off?” 

“Clint,” Coulson groans.

Bucky snorts. “Yeah. Just not easily.”

“Stark can probably help with that. He’ll be thrilled to have a project, I think he’s feeling left out nobody called him for help blowing up SHIELD. Where was I…oh yeah, then sometime in the positive media frenzy of ‘look at Captain America reunited with his long lost true love’, the CIA quietly releases a list of neutralized HYDRA threats, including the Winter Soldier. Which is why we need a man—er, woman on the ground in the CIA. And then you two live happily ever after.”

Steve blinks. “Will that work?”

“Sure,” Clint says with a cocky grin.

“It might, actually,” Natasha agrees. “HYDRA kept meticulous records, but it was in their best interest  _ not _ to attach Barnes’ name to the Winter Soldier. And nobody who’s still alive saw enough of the Winter Soldier’s face to recognize him as Bucky Barnes. Especially if he gets a new haircut and stays out of tac gear.”

“One problem.” Bucky clenches his hands into fists underneath the table. “Like half of this hinges on Stark’s help, and I’m pretty sure he’s not going to want to help me when he finds out I killed his parents.”

“Two problems, because there’s no way Agent Carter has the necessary clearance to help us with this.” Coulson frowns. 

“You know somebody who does though, right, babe?” Clint nudges. Steve’s eyebrows practically hit his hairline, and his eyes dart between Clint and Natasha and then Clint and Coulson. Natasha grins. 

“Maybe. If you all can get Stark on board, Maria, Nick, and I can figure out the CIA piece.”

Clint tips his chair back on two legs, looking smug. “Told you I had a plan,” he says, grinning at Bucky.

“And here I thought you weren’t any good at teamwork.”

Clint flips him off, so Bucky returns the gesture, and the meeting basically falls apart there. They clear coffee mugs and Coulson warns Steve they have to get out of D.C. without being seen or the whole thing is a waste (and honestly, does he think they were born  _ yesterday _ ? Does he think Steve’s gonna put on the star-spangled suit and they’ll ride out on a fucking parade?) and Natasha and Clint stand at the doorway shooting the shit for about twenty minutes before Coulson ushers them both out. Sam’s the last to leave, giving Steve a hug and telling them to call when they make it to New York, and then the door swings shut for the last time, the apartment quiet around them. 

Bucky wraps his arms around Steve’s middle and rests his head between his shoulder blades. Steve leans back against him.

“You said it wouldn’t be easy,” Bucky says.

“If all that sounds easy to you, then sure, I guess it will be easy.”


	3. Chapter 3

They go to New York separately. Steve doesn’t like it, but he knows Bucky can do it without being seen, and he can’t. Four people ask him for pictures at Union Station, and six more (all tourists) do at Penn Station. People ignore him on the subway and when he gets to Stark Tower, he has to call Tony because he gave Bucky his key-fob for the garage. 

“Cap,” Tony greets him, “I think I have something that belongs to you.”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees. “But you better let me up so I can check.”

The garage door opens slowly, and Steve ducks under it. He hits the button in the elevator for the penthouse, and when the doors slide open, Bucky and Tony are sitting awkwardly on the couch together. Steve laughs. 

“You know, a head’s up would’ve been appreciated. You’re lucky my old man was so obsessed with you, I recognized Barnes _ before _ the Winter Soldier.”

“Don’t be dramatic, Tony, I know Natasha called you.”

“She said Rogers and guest. I was expecting a lady friend.”

“No you weren’t.” Steve snorts. “If your old man really was obsessed then you definitely know more about me and Bucky than the average history book will say.”

Tony grins. “I mean, he may have hinted at something, although he was unsure whether you two ever…fondued.”

Steve groans. Of _fucking_ course Tony knows that story. And Bucky does too, because Steve had told him, somewhere in Italy, trying to draw out the old Bucky from the shell he rescued from HYDRA. And it had worked, a little, but not the way it does tonight. 

Because Bucky laughs, right on cue, laughs like Steve hasn’t heard since 1944, or maybe even before that. Steve can’t help it, he laughs too, and Tony just sort of stares at both of them.

“Of course he wasn’t sure,” Bucky grins. “Howard was too busy with his own fondue to pay attention to anybody else’s.”

“_ That _I can believe.” Tony snorts. “All right, Tin Man, let’s take a look at that arm. What? It’s why you guys are here, aside from, you know, basically being wanted by every major government agency in the world. So let’s get this show on the road, Pepper’s looking forward to making international news outlets dance like her puppets. It’s her favorite.”

“Tony…we have to talk about something first.”

Bucky shakes his head. “Steve needs to go unpack. I need to talk to you.”

Tony’s grin slips, and Steve thinks he knows (or at least suspects) what’s coming. Tony’s always been good at dealing in the worst case scenario.

“Yeah, okay. You know where to go, Cap. Barnes and I will be fine.”

Steve really, _ really _doubts that but they’re short on options. He goes back to the elevator, rides it down two floors and finds his apartment pretty much unchanged from the last time he stayed here (for about three months after Loki, and then Fury had asked him to come to D.C. and start running ops with Natasha, since Clint was still out of commission).

“JARVIS,” he says, feeling as dumb as he always does talking to an empty room. “Keep an eye on things up there.”

“Of course, Captain.”

It takes him all of ten minutes to put away his clothes and hang the shield up. Then, he paces, waiting, unsure if the amount of time this is taking is a good or a bad thing. 

The ding of the elevator startles him maybe twenty minutes later, and when Bucky steps out he looks _ wrecked _. Steve opens his arms automatically and Bucky collides with him with enough force to knock them over if Steve hadn’t been bracing for it. 

“It’s okay,” he says automatically, even though it obviously isn’t. “We’ll figure something else out.”

Bucky shakes his head. “No.”

“We will, I promise. Natasha is good for at least three backup plans, and if all else fails we’ll go AWOL.”

“No, I mean, he’ll still help us. He’s not happy about it, but he’ll do it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Me either. Best I can figure is he’s a big fan of yours.”

“I should go talk to him.”

“Yeah, but not now. His girl’s up there. We’ll see him tomorrow.”

“Okay. You wanna watch a movie or something?”

“Nah,” Bucky says. “Just want this.”

Steve nods, and tugs Bucky back toward the bedroom. They kick off their shoes and shuck out of clothes, slide between cool sheets together. This bed is bigger than the one in D.C., but they still roll right to the middle, Steve on his back and Bucky curled next to him, the way they belong, have always belonged. 

“If this works,” Bucky says, “and I’m still only half-sure it will…it’s not everything.”

“I know.”

“I’m still…I’m always gonna be the Winter Soldier. I can’t promise that it will ever be better, because I close my eyes at night and all I see are the orders I followed, the things I did, the people I killed and I don’t…” Bucky’s breath hitches and Steve tightens the arm around his shoulders. “I don’t know how to come back from that. I don’t know how to be Bucky Barnes anymore.”

Steve swallows hard around the lump in his throat. “You’re always Bucky Barnes. Isn’t that how it works? If you’re always the Winter Soldier and Bucky _ is _ the Winter Soldier, then you’re always Bucky. We can get you help with the rest, because we’re not the only ones who’ve come back from a war horrified by what we’ve been ordered to do. But this buys us some time.”

“Yeah.” Bucky nods. “I know.”

“And you didn’t do those things. HYDRA did. They took you from me and they took your choices and they used you like a weapon, like puppet, like a fucking—

“Dancing monkey,” Bucky says with a weak smile, and Steve takes the joke for what it is, a signal that Bucky wants to talk about something else. 

“Sure, like a dancing monkey, although if we’re gonna compare, I got the better costume.”

“No argument here. I loved that costume.”

“You did not.”

Bucky rolls on top of him, grinning. “I _ really _ did.”

* * *

Stark wakes them early the next morning, “We’re Off to See the Wizard” blaring through every speaker in Steve’s apartment. 

“I never should’ve admitted to understanding that flying monkeys reference,” Steve groans, still sounding half-asleep. 

Bucky shoves Steve into the shower and climbs in with him, huddling together under the hot spray and trading lazy kisses and hand jobs and then just standing pressed close together for the novelty of it, just because they finally _ can _. 

_ The Wizard of Oz _soundtrack is still playing when they turn the taps off, and Bucky grins as Steve whistles along. He’s sure they went to see it together in ‘39, remembers the pure delight of Technicolor Oz when everything else was awash in grays and browns, remembers Steve being sweet on Judy Garland even though he rolled his eyes and swore otherwise every time Bucky teased him about it. 

Tony is waiting for them in his lab, surrounded by chirping robots and pieces of machinery for his suits, for weapons, for armor, and for more than Bucky can identify. Tony’s skin is sallow, dark circles under his eyes like he hasn’t slept, and probably he hasn’t. He’d listened to Bucky’s story pretty much silently, offered no forgiveness (not that Bucky expected or deserves any), said he’d still help, and called his girlfriend. Wife. Whoever the redhead is. 

“I can’t even hate you,” Tony had said before Bucky left, sounding miserable about it. “I want to, I really fucking want to, but mostly I just feel sorry for you.”

Tony is as good as his word. Every line of his face broadcasts pity when he looks at Bucky. It’s worse than anger. He knows what to do with anger. He doesn’t know what to do with Tony’s pity except sit with it, heavy and uncomfortable between them.

“Okay,” Tony says ushering them through a door into another room. “In a perfect world we’d go down to medical and do a CT scan but I’m guessing that would be a waste of our time. It’s just going to be all streaked, so we’re not going to be able to see for shit.”

Tony flicks on the lights, bright and fluorescent. The smell of bleach burns in his nose and there’s a chair in the middle of the room and for a moment he’s in a bank vault in D.C./a base in Siberia/an old hospital in Poland/a munitions factory in Italy. 

But Tony’s talking a mile a minute and Steve’s hands are on his shoulders. 

“So I think we’re just gonna have to do this as carefully as we can, and hope for the best.”

“That’s your big idea?” Steve scowls. “Hope for the best?”

Tony ignores him and turns to Bucky. “Is there any bone or tissue under there?” 

“No.”

“Okay.” Tony nods. “Do you have any sensation anywhere?”

“No.”

“That’s good. That means we don’t have to worry about pain.”

Tony herds him toward the chair, and makes him sit. “Shirt.”

Steve makes a noise somewhere between a cough and a laugh. Bucky grabs his t-shirt by the neck and pulls it off, throwing it at Steve.

Tony sits on a wheeled stool and scoots closer to Bucky’s left shoulder. He reaches to touch, and then hesitates. “This thing isn’t like…sentient?”

“Touch it and find out.” 

Tony snorts. “That’s what she said.”

Steve groans. “That doesn’t even make sense.”

Tony probes the seam where metal meets skin with gentle fingertips. 

“I think it comes off in one piece. Or it has…before.”

He’s had five or six arms over the last seventy years, replaced due to damage or upgrades. He thinks he’s only had this one about five years, remembers the switch happening after two of the fingers on the previous one froze up or died, somehow. 

Tony frowns, and keeps searching, lifting the arm up, sliding his hands along the edges, searching for something. 

“If it does,” he says after a few minutes, “there’s some trick I’m not finding.”

“Okay. So what’s plan B?” Steve frowns.

“I’m going to have to take it apart one piece at a time. Get comfortable, Rogers, we’re gonna be here awhile.”

It’s an understatement. It takes Tony an hour to—through extensive trial and error—figure out which tools he wants, then another hour to figure out—mostly via error—he has to start from the fingers instead of the shoulder.

Somewhere in hour four, when Bucky’s down three fingers and half a palm, Tony says, “You know, in a perfect world, I’d just blast the thing off. But I think the science gods would actually smite me right here for destroying a piece of machinery this advanced. For its time, I mean.”

“Wait, that’s what’s taking you so fuckin’ long?” Bucky snaps. “You wanna preserve this thing for posterity? Aside from the fact that _ nobody _ wants that, the first arm I had probably got melted down sixty years ago. This is number five, and they put it on in ’08 or ’09.”

Tony drops his tools. “Wait here.”

He comes back with one of Iron Man’s gauntlets, and Steve shakes his head. “This is a terrible idea.”

“Just _trust_ _me_,” Tony glares at Steve and turns back to Bucky. “You definitely want this thing gone, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re one hundred percent sure you don’t have any of your own arm under there?”

“I’m sure. Anywhere there’s metal, there’s nothing of me left.”

Tony hesitates. “I’m gonna leave the shoulder, because you’re going to have to live as amputee Bucky Barnes long enough for the press and whoever else to buy the sob story. Plus that means we don’t have to start from scratch when I build a new arm for you.”

Steve looks surprised. “What?”

“I mean, HYDRA did a decent job but I can do better. Especially if I can get my hands on more vibranium.”

“You don’t have to,” Bucky says. He already owes Tony more than he’ll ever be able to repay, took things from him that can never be replaced. “I’m betting they make decent prosthetics now.”

Tony sounds almost offended when he says, “We can do a hell of a lot better than _ decent _.” With that, he shoves his right hand into the gauntlet and grabs what’s left of Bucky’s metal hand with his left. “Steve, come hold him down, just in case. You flinch and this could get ugly.”

Steve scowls, but he moves to stand behind Bucky’s chair, putting both hands on his shoulders and holding tightly. Maybe too tightly, but Bucky doesn’t mind. Steve ducks his head, his mouth close to Bucky’s ear.

“Close your eyes,” he whispers. “It’ll be over in a minute.”

They both do, and two seconds later, it’s done. The metal arm clatters heavily on the floor and Bucky feels a knot of tension he never realized he was holding between his shoulders start to release.

“You okay?” Steve asks. He doesn’t let go of his grip on Bucky’s shoulders.

“Yeah. I feel lighter.”

“Not surprised. This is a heavy motherfucker, no wonder you’re so jacked.” Tony nudges the arm with his foot, pushing it out of the way to roll closer and inspect the piece still attached to Bucky. “I’ll clean up the wires and we can find something to cover it so you don’t snag it on everything. And then I guess it’s on to planning your big coming out party.”

Steve doesn’t move even though he could—Bucky’s not about to sock Tony for trimming some wires—but Steve just tucks his face against Bucky’s neck and Bucky figures he needs a minute. 

Or more like ten, because Tony finishes and shoots Bucky a look that very clearly says _ not my problem _and scurries out of the room like it’s on fire. He’s getting the sense that Tony doesn’t handle emotions (his own, or anybody else’s) particularly well. 

“Steve.” He pushes at him with his good—_ only _—hand, because Steve can’t be comfortable hunched over the back of Bucky’s chair like that. Steve straightens, and Bucky turns in the chair to face him. 

“Sorry.”

“What’s going on?”

Steve shrugs. Bucky waits. 

“This might actually work,” Steve says.

Steve’s face is doing something he doesn’t recognize, something soft and sad that doesn’t really jibe with any of his memories of Steve. Even when he was five-four and a buck ten, there was nothing _ soft _ about Steve. 

“And that’s a…bad thing?” he asks, suddenly terrified the answer will be yes, that Steve has changed his mind, that he doesn’t want anything to do with him.

“It’s the best thing that’s ever fucking happened to me.”

Relief floods him so quickly he feels giddy with it. “You gotta admit, pal, that’s not a very high bar to clear.”

Steve looks offended for a second and then he’s laughing, loud and bright, and everything else may have changed but his laugh is still exactly the one the Winter Soldier remembered.

* * *

They start to arrive—_assemble_—at the tower piecemeal, first Sam, because they’re pretty sure the CIA isn’t watching him. Then Natasha, because they know the CIA is watching her, and she’s their business-as-usual cover. Then Thor, because he can land on the helipad at the tower without anybody even noticing, despite the fact that he comes down on a _rainbow bridge_ _from outer space_, and Bucky had just about pissed himself laughing when Steve explained that one. 

Banner is AWOL for now but he’s on board, according to Tony, and Steve figures that’s good enough. 

Clint and Coulson last, because they’re already in New York. They live together in an apartment in Alphabet City, have done the entire time Steve’s known them, and he’s still wrapping his head around the idea that they’re married. It says something about the state of his life that Coulson not being dead is less surprising. 

Tony orders pizzas, and they gather in one of the common rooms Tony had the foresight to add to the building. Natasha passes around paper plates and Thor hands out beers, nothing strong enough to get him or Steve or Bucky drunk.

“Next time, I’ll bring ale from Asgard,” he promises, and Steve shrugs. It’s been long enough since he’s had a drink he doesn’t really miss it. 

Clint and Natasha tease each other like siblings, just this side of cruel in a way that Steve knows they’d never tolerate from anyone else. 

Sam and Natasha tease each other entirely differently, and Steve wonders how much time they’ve been spending together without him. Plenty, he thinks, if the glances between them are anything to go by.

Pepper and Coulson have a camaraderie built on mutual exasperation with everything, which clearly irritates Tony to no end. 

Bucky is quiet next to him, his eyes darting around the table as he tries to absorb everyone’s conversations simultaneously, his body too still and his pizza untouched as he devotes all of his focus to the task. 

Steve puts his hand on Bucky’s thigh, and Bucky looks over at him, every line of his body still holding tension.

“This is new for all of us,” he says, quietly.

The last time they sat around a table like this they were getting shawarma after Loki destroyed most of Midtown. 

Bucky nods, a tense jerk of his head that’s more Winter Soldier than Bucky. Steve puts his arm around Bucky’s shoulders and tugs gently, until Bucky slides over a few inches on the bench and relaxes against Steve’s side. 

Pepper smiles softly at them both.

“…and then,” Clint’s saying, “we waltz back into HQ like we weren’t just off the grid for six months—

“Seven and a half,” Coulson corrects.

“Just came in the front door like civilians. Nat was still bleeding, my nose had been broken so many times it’s never looked the same since—

“Saved you the money for a nose job,” Natasha shrugs.

“We just about gave the front desk girl a heart attack. Black Widow and Hawkeye, risen from the grave. I think she was this close to pressing the ‘zombie apocalypse’ button.”

Coulson rolls his eyes. “Don’t flatter yourselves. We’d clocked you coming back into the country. Melanie was worried you were going to get blood on the tile, that’s all.”

Clint grins, because this is clearly a well-rehearsed and oft-told story, all three of them with their own lines and cues. “And that’s what happened in Budapest.”

Tony snorts a laugh. “Yeah, sure it is. I’ve seen the file. It’s so redacted the only words left are the prepositions, but you can tell us all about it over pizza.”

“Of course you dug up the file.” Coulson sighs heavily.

“It’s probably better for your stress levels if you just assume I’ve dug up every file, _ Phil _.”

After pizza, Pepper and Coulson both pull out tablets.

“We’ve got our CIA in.” Coulson says. “Melinda May.”

Clint whistles through his teeth. “The Cavalry?”

“Jesus, you _ know _ her?” Sam looks awed. “I thought she was just an urban legend or something.”

“You know better than to call her that,” Coulson frowns at Clint.

“I didn’t know she was CIA now,” Natasha says. “Although I suppose that _ is _ the point.”

“She ended up there after Bahrain,” Coulson says. “Maria’s kept in better touch than I have.”

Pepper scribbles something on her tablet with a stylus and asks, “Timeline?”

“Phase One, four weeks. Phase Two, six months,” Coulson says. “Phase One begins next Tuesday with a press release about the re-formed independent Avengers and the work they’ve been doing to take down HYDRA. Buried in that press release will be information about POWs recovered from HYDRA bases, no names to protect their privacy.

“Phase One, week two begins with a leak from a reliable source—

“Darcy?” Pepper asks.

“Darcy,” Coulson confirms. “That one of those POWs is James Buchanan Barnes. The party line is ‘no comment’ until phase one, week three when Steve and/or Bucky will release a statement themselves. We let the initial frenzy die down, and then there is a print interview and photograph released in Phase One, week four.”

“And Phase Two?” Steve asks.

“The long game.” Coulson says. “You two lie low, but not _ too _ low because that will be suspicious. You get photographed buying groceries, getting coffee, walking your dog—

“We don’t have a dog.”

“You can borrow Lucky,” Clint offers.

“You don’t need a dog. It was just an example. You are only photographed in civilian clothes, doing the most mundane things possible. You need to be _ boring _, Barnes especially. The more boring you are, the sooner people will stop following your every move.”

“And if some crisis happens and we all need to suit up?” Steve frowns.

“Captain America goes, but Barnes can’t.” Coulson frowns. “His fighting style is too distinctive, someone will recognize him right away. And…” Coulson hesitates.

“You can say it,” Bucky says. “We don’t know how deep my programming goes or what triggers it and that makes me a liability.”

“And that,” Coulson agrees.

“To be honest, it’s kind of a relief,” Bucky says, and Steve can’t tell whether he’s lying. “I’ve had my fill of fighting.”

“After about six months, the CIA will release the list of neutralized and captured HYDRA assets. The Winter Soldier will be on it. It’s already quite a healthy list, according to May, so the Winter Soldier will fit right in.”

“Will I be captured or neutralized?” Bucky asks dryly. 

“Captured. Fury’s orders.”

“That’s not what we agreed.” Steve scowls. “The whole point of this is so Bucky can live freely, can _ stop _, if Fury thinks he’s going to just become an Avengers asset—

“Steve, babe,” Bucky shakes his head, “it’s okay.”

“It’s not,” Steve says.

“It’s a precaution more than anything.” Coulson insists. “Fury can’t force Bucky to do anything. Listing the Winter Soldier as captured is a good cover if someone recognizes him. Listing him as dead and having the whole thing blow up in our faces does us no favors when we’re trying to garner goodwill for him.”

“Fury _ won’t _force Bucky to do anything,” Steve says, feeling certain the distinction matters. Coulson is a deliberate man, after all. He says things exactly as he means them. “Or he can find himself a new Captain America.”

“It won’t come to that,” Coulson says, and Steve wants to laugh and tell him not to be so sure, but given it’s his only leverage, he knows better than to play fast and loose with it. 

“Geneva Conventions aside…doesn’t he look a little too _ healthy _ for someone who’s been a POW for seventy years?” Tony frowns.

They all look at Bucky. He fidgets under the scrutiny. “I can’t really lose weight.”

“He’s right.” Steve frowns. “We can’t. The serum…it maintains peak physical condition even without proper nutrition.”

“Mine probably isn’t as good as Steve’s, since I got the HYDRA version, but they spent a lot of time testing the limit of that particular feature. It takes four months for me to lose any muscle mass, six months to feel any physical weakness, a year for my organs to start to shut down—

“Sorry,” Tony says, “do you mean they didn’t _ feed _ you for a year?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, his voice cold. “That’s what I mean.”

Steve grips the table leg next to him hard enough he feels the thing crack under his hand and the table wobbles ominously.

Tony looks like he regrets asking, at least. 

“We will share in our statement that HYDRA gave Barnes a close approximation of Erskine’s serum. People are obviously going to notice he looks great for ninety-seven.”

“I need a minute,” Bucky says in Steve’s ear, and Steve nods, watches as Bucky walks away from the table and goes to the elevator, disappearing behind the metal door a moment later.

“This has to work,” Steve says, not able to hide how desperate he feels. 

“It will,” Thor says with conviction. 

“It should,” Coulson corrects. “There are always a few variables outside our control.”

Coulson and Pepper start assigning tasks and by the time Bucky resurfaces, looking drawn but otherwise fine, they’re mostly back to just catching up. Clint pulls Bucky into a conversation with him and Phil, one that seems to switch rapid-fire between English, Russian, Mandarin and something with hard consonants and short vowels Steve doesn’t recognize.

Tony bumps Steve’s shoulder with his own. “You okay, Cap?”

“Yes,” Steve says, automatically. Then, “No.”

“Yeah, I figured.”

“Are you okay?” Steve asks. “It can’t be easy, after what he told you.”

Tony grimaces. “I don’t blame him. This is HYDRA’s fucking fault, all of it.”

“It is. But that still doesn’t make it easy.”

“No,” Tony agrees. “You’re right, it still sucks. My parents weren’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but they were still my parents.”

“Thank you for helping us anyway.”

“Don’t mention it,” Tony says, and then he grins self-deprecatingly, and Steve knows to expect a deflection next. “Seriously, don’t. Talking about this shit makes me break out in hives, Pepper will back me up on that.”

“I’ll do no such thing,” Pepper says, still sitting at the table, tapping away at her tablet. 

“Thanks for everything, Pepper.”

“Don’t thank me yet, I’ve barely done anything. The real fun begins next week.”

* * *

Phase One, week one is anticlimactic. The press release gets circled around for a few days, makes international news, and a handful of reporters block the sidewalk in front of the tower, shouting questions about the Avengers at anyone who comes out of the building (so mostly a lot of Stark Industries corporate employees who have no answers to any of the questions get harassed just trying to go about their normal lives).

It’s about what Bucky expected. Nobody’s asking about the POWs because Pepper Potts doesn’t want them to, yet. She distracted them all with flash, with Iron Man and Hawkeye and Thor and Captain America and Hulk and Black Widow instead, and it worked like a dream because that’s what Pepper _ does. _

“It’s time,” she tells Steve over breakfast on Wednesday of Phase One, week one, and Steve nods. 

“Time for what?” Bucky frowns. “I thought Darcy’s tweet isn’t going out until a week from tomorrow.”

“It’s not.” Pepper says.

“Your haircut,” Steve says, and looks almost upset about it.

“Okay,” Bucky shrugs.

He figures Tony has a barber on staff (he _ must _, it seems like exactly the sort of thing he would do), but instead Steve pulls him into their bathroom and there’s a pair of scissors and a set of electric clippers on the counter and a chair from their kitchen in front of the mirror.

“Oh,” Bucky says, surprised. 

He sits in the chair and looks at Steve in the mirror. Steve smiles almost wistfully and tugs on the bun he’d twisted Bucky’s hair into that morning.“I’m gonna miss this, I think.”

“I’ll grow it out again, when all this dies down.”

Steve nods, and takes out the elastic. 

It’s weird, watching in the mirror as he becomes 1945 Bucky Barnes again. 

Although…not quite. Steve trims it shorter on the sides than he used to wear it and a little longer on the top. It suits him.

“It’s how the kids are wearing it,” Steve says. “Pepper wanted to go full nostalgia, side part and everything, but that felt a little too on the nose.”

“Yeah, you’ve already got the nostalgia angle covered,” Bucky grins.

Phase One, week two is a little busier. #JamesBuchananBarnes, #buckybarnes, #howlingcommandos, and #CaptainAmerica trend on Twitter for three days straight after @thegovtstolemyipod tweets _ your favorite secret agent and mine shares exclusively that Sgt. James Barnes is among the rescued HYDRA POWs _ and then a follow up with a picture of him from the Smithsonian exhibit. _ Yes. THIS James Barnes. _

(@thegovtstolemyipod is the mysterious Darcy, who apparently runs her hyper-popular government conspiracy twitter account from London, fueled almost exclusively with intel from Coulson. He suspects she was also the go-between who passed information to Fury while they waited in that safe house on the river.)

The crowd of reporters outside Stark tower grows so big that the NYPD has to come and set up barricades and keep officers on duty 24/7. Tony spends a small fortune keeping the officers in coffee and donuts and pizzas.

Pepper gives Steve her tablet. “Press release, take four,” she says, and Steve reads it, shaking his head. Pepper sighs and hands over the stylus, wincing as Steve marks up almost the whole thing. 

Bucky, curious, peers over Steve’s shoulder. He can barely read anything thanks to all of Steve’s edits, but toward the end he can see Steve crossed out _ best friend _ and wrote _ partner _ instead, and Bucky smiles into his coffee mug. 

> **Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes Alive and Well**
> 
> **Captain America confirms recovery of Howling Commandos sniper**
> 
> October 14, 2014, New York, NY— Captain Steve Rogers today confirms that Sergeant James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes, born March 10, 1917, was indeed among the prisoners rescued from HYDRA earlier this year. Rogers and Barnes grew up together and were both members of the Howling Commandos, an elite squad of soldiers tasked with taking down HYDRA during World War II. Barnes was declared missing in action in 1945 after a fall from a train in the Alps on a mission to capture HYDRA scientist Arnim Zola.
> 
> The fall did not kill Sergeant Barnes, as assumed. He was captured by HYDRA and held prisoner, used by HYDRA’s scientists in experiments to recreate the same serum administered to Rogers during World War II. A full medical exam performed on Barnes confirms that HYDRA scientists achieved some measure of success replicating Dr. Abraham Erskine’s formula. It is currently unknown whether Barnes is the only recipient of HYDRA’s version of the supersoldier serum.
> 
> Rogers is overjoyed to be reunited with his partner. “Losing Bucky was the hardest thing I ever had to go through, and to find him alive after all this time is some kind of miracle.” 
> 
> Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes ask that the public respect their privacy at this time.
> 
>   


Phase one, week three and Steve’s press release goes nuclear. 

“It’s a great story on it’s own,” Pepper says, “but add ‘did Captain America just come out?’ to it, and it’s unprecedented.”

She has an army of assistants fielding (i.e. turning down) the requests for print interviews, television interviews and photoshoots. The Smithsonian calls to ask for clarification because they want to update their exhibit and extend its run, potentially make it part of the permanent collection. The Army releases a statement commending Bucky for his bravery. The motherfucking _ President _ wants them to come to the White House.

“Yes, I meant partner exactly like that,” Steve tells the Smithsonian. 

“Thank you, ma’am. Maybe when this all calms down,” Steve tells the president.

“Sorry,” Steve tells Bucky. “I didn’t think it would be like this.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Bucky grins. “It’s efficient this way. Gets it all done in one fell swoop.”

Phase one, week four arrives with a front page article in the _ Times _, written by a journalist Tony recommended and Pepper had grudgingly agreed would be the right one. (Bucky figures there’s a history there, because Pepper and Christine were icily civil with one another for the duration of the interview.) Bucky didn’t have a strong opinion on Christine either way, but the article she writes is fair and measured, and it garners a lot of sympathy for the two of them, painting them as star-crossed for most of their youth, finally reuniting after seventy years in a world where they can be together openly. By prior agreement she asks him very little about HYDRA. He suspects they told her it’s classified information, when really it’s just to keep him from putting any lies in print.

Agent May “debriefs” him, a winking charade of basically sitting in a room with her and Coulson and Steve for long enough to be believable. Coulson already wrote a report for May to turn into her superiors, padded with some HYDRA intel but not much, since Bucky the lab rat wouldn’t have had anywhere near the level of access the Winter Soldier did. Because Coulson is Coulson, though, the intel is good enough to keep the CIA occupied and satisfied enough to more or less forget he exists. 

“So far, so good?” Steve asks, crawling into bed beside him the night before Phase Two begins in earnest.

“Too good to be true, maybe,” Bucky says. There’s been a skittering anxiety creeping up his spine since Darcy’s tweet went viral that he’s been trying (and mostly failing) to ignore. 

“I know,” Steve says. “But if anybody can pull this off, it’s Pepper and Coulson. They could run the world and not even break a sweat.”

That’s not as reassuring as Steve thinks, because Bucky’s spent plenty of time with people who could—and _ have _—run the world and it never goes off without a hitch. That was what he was for: to clean up the mess, to bury the evidence, to put a bullet in the brain of the guy who could talk and bring the whole thing down as easily as a house of cards.

Steve must get a sense of what he’s thinking, because he kisses Bucky softly and says, “I didn’t mean it like that. We’re lucky to have them in our corner, is all.”

“Yeah,” Bucky agrees, knowing it’s true. Bucky’s best plan was to run, to disappear, because it’s always his first instinct, but this is better. They have people who care about them watching their six, and he hasn’t had that since the war, since the Howling Commandos. Still, he can’t keep the question that’s been sitting heavy in the back of his mind for weeks from finally escaping. “If someone ever puts it together…what’s going to happen to you? I know what’ll happen to me—

And he does. He’s not an idiot. Super-max, solitary confinement, at the very least, or they’ll just cut to the chase and give him the death penalty. They’d do that for JFK alone, and that’s not even the worst thing he’s done by a long shot.

“They’re not—

“Steve,” Bucky says. “Please.”

Steve sits up. Bucky eyes the tense set of his shoulders. He scrubs a hand over his face and turns to look at Bucky. 

“The deal hasn’t changed,” Steve says. “I’m with you ’til the end of the line.”

Bucky knows he was the one who said it first. Sometimes, though, he wishes he never did. Steve shouldn’t have to ride this train with him. “Steve—

“Stop,” Steve says so loudly Bucky startles. “I know you’re worried. I am too. But, god, Bucky, this is a done deal for me. Anybody gunning for you is gunning for _ us. _ It’s always going to be _ us _.”

“That’s not fair.” Bucky frowns. “I can’t bring you into this with me.”

“Bullshit.” Steve scowls. “We’ve been in this since we were kids. Maybe you don’t remember, but I do. I was six years old when you told Tommy O’Neill that anybody looking to pick a fight with me was picking one with you too. That’s a two-way street, pal.”

“There’s a big fuckin’ difference between Tommy O’Neill and the full force of the US government.”

“Not to me.”

Bucky stares at him, because Steve actually means it. “You’re crazy.”

Steve shrugs. “Maybe. But you’re stuck with me.”

* * *

“D’you think we’re boring enough yet?” Bucky asks, just before Christmas, a month into Phase Two. “There’s something I wanna do, but I’d rather not have an audience.”

Steve looks up from his phone. He’s taken to scrolling through Twitter at breakfast, just to see how often they show up. It’s a handy gauge for whether they’re lying low enough without seeming suspicious. Someone took a picture of them on Monday running in the park, but there hasn’t been anything new since then. “Depends. What do you have in mind?”

“Can I take you to dinner tonight?” Bucky’s cheeks pink as he asks, and he looks down at his breakfast to hide it. 

“Like a date?” Steve asks, fighting a grin. 

“No, I’ve got a great business opportunity to pitch you.” Bucky rolls his eyes. “_ Yes _, a date.”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “You don’t have to ask.”

“Wanted to.” Bucky shrugs. “You don’t think they’ll bug us?”

“Nah, I’ve got an idea.”

Steve’s already got three days’ worth of beard growing in, and he figures if glasses worked in D.C. they’ll probably work in New York too. Bucky’s a little less recognizable—his face has only been in the papers and on the internet for the last couple months. Steve’s still the one people notice first. 

“Does Tony have a new arm for you to try?” Steve asks.

“Yeah,” Bucky says darkly. The first trial had gone poorly. Steve’s still not sure he’s gotten the whole story from either Tony or Bucky. He’s pieced together enough, though, to figure out that the arm Tony made was too similar to the HYDRA one. Bucky had hated it. 

“Maybe try it tonight. People tend to notice—

“When you only have one arm? Yeah, that’s not exactly news, babe.” Bucky shakes his head. “Tony’s in California until New Year anyway. It’ll be fine.” 

“Okay. Where are we going?” 

“It’s a surprise. Nothing fancy, dress normal.”

Steve grins, “All right.”

“What’s with the glasses?” Bucky asks, later, when they’re grabbing coats and pulling on shoes. Bucky’s taken to wearing sneakers like Tony’s, clunky high-tops he doesn’t have to lace and unlace every time he puts them on or takes them off. In jeans and sneakers and his green sweatshirt under a navy peacoat, he looks like he fits in here.

As much as Steve’s gotten used to the twenty-first century—has adapted to the new technology, learned the jargon and new slang the way he picked up a bit of French and Italian and German during the war, has figured out that what used to be casual dress for him is now too formal for most everywhere he goes—he still feels out of place, most times. Then again, Bucky was always better at fitting in before the war, too.

“They’re my disguise,” Steve grins.

“Okay, Clark Kent,” Bucky laughs.

“I know, that’s what I thought too, but it seems to work.”

It’s cold and already dark when the elevator spits them out in the lobby of the building. There’s no one loitering on the sidewalk, and Steve feels Bucky relax next to him. Bucky opens the door for him with a wink. 

“Wow, this really is a date.” Steve smiles. 

“Toldja,” Bucky says, and nudges Steve with his shoulder in the direction of the subway. Steve figures out pretty quickly that they’re heading to Brooklyn. The car is still a little crowded with the last wave of commuters, and Steve uses it as an excuse to lean close to Bucky. 

It feels colder when they come up from underground, their breath fogging in front of them. Steve’s surprised when Bucky slides his hand into his, but he holds on. Nobody even looks twice at them.

Bucky leads him down familiar streets. Whole blocks look exactly the same as he remembers, while others have changed so much that if you showed him a picture, Steve wouldn’t even know it was Brooklyn. 

“I think I got beat up down that alley,” Steve says; he can’t resist bringing back the old joke. 

“Babe, it would be harder to find an alley you _ didn’t _ get your ass kicked in,” Bucky says easily, exactly like Steve knew he would. He pulls Steve around one more corner.

“No fucking way,” Steve gasps, surprised. 

“I know,” Bucky agrees. “Of all the things to survive, I never woulda put money on this place.”

“Me either.” 

The awning is still green and white stripes, although it’s probably not the same one. There are people sitting at the counter, and Steve can tell from here the menu hasn’t changed much (although he’s willing to bet the prices have). 

“C’mon.” Bucky ushers him inside. 

The booths are red vinyl now, instead of green, but the floor is still a black and white checkerboard. The hostess seats them in a booth in the window.

“When was the last time we were here?” Steve asks, flipping idly through his menu even though he knows already he wants a patty melt. 

“Night before I shipped out for basic,” Bucky says. “You ditched us before the dancing.”

“Sounds like me.”

“Betty was heartbroken. Cried on my shoulder all night.”

“She did not,” Steve laughs. 

“She could’ve. You weren’t there to see it.”

“Somehow, I think she was just fine. Besides, you got home early that night, so she couldn’t have been too distraught.”

“Did I? I don’t remember.”

“I was waiting up. Didn’t want to miss you come in, since you were leaving so early in the morning.” Steve admits. “It was barely ten. I almost…I almost told you everything, that night. I spent the whole walk home thinking about what I’d say, and then when you came in I pretended to be asleep instead.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” Bucky says. “I wouldn’t have gone if you did.”

“Maybe that would’ve been better,” Steve says, the closest he’s ever come to admitting how much of his life he regrets. 

Bucky shakes his head. “Nah. You remember how it was for draft dodgers. I would’ve ended up in jail.”

“Draft?” Steve frowns. “Bucky, you enlisted.”

Bucky shakes his head. “No. My number came up. You think I would’ve left you if I’d had a choice about it?”

_ Yes _, Steve almost says. Not because he thinks Bucky wanted to leave, but because that’s what it was like after Pearl Harbor. Everyone was enlisting. If you didn’t…you were either a 4F like him, or you were a coward. The waitress comes and takes their orders, and Steve orders his patty melt and asks for a root beer float, not because he really wants one but because it’s the only thing that pops into his head when she asks him what he wants to drink. 

Bucky orders meatloaf, his eyes on Steve the whole time. 

“Steve?” Bucky asks, when she walks away. 

“You never said you were drafted.”

Bucky frowns. “I don’t…I can’t remember. Why wouldn’t I have told you?”

Steve figures it was because he was making Bucky miserable, trying over and over again to enlist. It was the thing they fought about most, then.

Steve wants to ease the distressed wrinkle in Bucky’s forehead. Until now, they’ve remembered things more or less the same. Sure, not some of the little things, differences of perspective and opinion. But the big things, the things that have yes or no answers when Bucky says _am I wrong, or_ and _do you remember_—Steve’s always been able to clear things up. 

So he says, “It’s fine, Buck.” But it’s not. Bucky never wanted to be a soldier, he never planned on enlisting or fighting, and instead it’s all he’s done for the last seventy years. 

Their food comes, and Bucky’s still frowning. He frowns the rest of the way through dinner, even as they’re talking about plans for Christmas (just the two of them) and New Year’s (Tony wants them to come out to Malibu for his annual party; Steve wants to turn him down and Bucky’s feeling neutral about it). 

He cheers slightly in time for dessert, ordering pie with a scoop of ice cream, and when the check comes he insists on paying, glaring at Steve when he reaches for his own wallet.

“I got money, too, now,” Bucky says, and it’s true. His back pay from the army has started to come through. He’s got a bank account, a checkbook, and an ATM card and they’re working on getting him a credit card. 

“I could get used to this,” Steve grins. “I’ll just start leaving my wallet at home, huh?”

Bucky shoves him out the door, laughing. The temperature has dropped, and it smells like it might snow. 

“White Christmas, maybe,” Bucky says, letting Steve pull him close for the walk to the subway.

Their apartment is dim and warm when they get home, and neither of them bothers turning on any lights. They kick off shoes and hang up coats, and in the bedroom they strip and fall into the bed. 

Bucky kisses him urgently, desperately, and Steve clings to him.

“I wouldn’t have left,” Bucky says roughly. “I wouldn’t.”

“I know, Buck,” Steve says, and his heart twists, thinking of that other life, the one they might’ve had if Bucky’s number never came up, if Steve never met Erskine, if they’d both stayed in Brooklyn together. “I love you,” he says, like that makes up for it. 

But Bucky nods and some of the tension seeps out of him, so maybe it does. “Love you, punk.”

* * *

“I think you’re going to like this one,” Tony says, as Bucky crosses the threshold into the workshop. Tony’s thought Bucky was going to like four arms so far, and he was wrong every time. Bucky’s not expecting today to go any differently. 

“Worth a try,” he says instead.

“Steve still in Russia?” Tony asks while he clears off a chair for Bucky to sit down. 

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “Last I heard.”

Steve and Natasha have been gone for three weeks, dealing with some HYDRA fallout on Fury’s orders. Bucky’s handling Steve’s absence poorly. He’s bored, he’s not sleeping well, and he’s anxious, even knowing that Steve’s about as safe as anyone can be in the field, especially with Natasha watching his six.

Mostly, though, he can’t stop thinking of the look on Steve’s face when he left. He’d kissed Bucky goodbye, and then he’d slung the bag containing his uniform and the shield over his shoulder, heading for the door. He’d squared his shoulders and when he looked back at Bucky Steve Rogers had disappeared into Captain America, his mouth set and his eyes flat. 

It didn’t used to be like that. Under the helmet, behind the shield, he always saw _ Steve _. (Or, usually. He figures the first couple times in D.C. are freebies, all things considered.) He wonders when it changed, when Captain America became something separate for Steve.

He has a guess. 

“How was he?” he asks Tony. “When he first came out of the ice?”

Tony shrugs. “I’m not sure about at first. He was defrosted for a couple months before we crossed paths.”

“Close enough.”

“Honestly?”

“Yeah.”

“He seemed…lost, mostly. He was also a tremendous pain in the ass, but I’ve come to learn that’s basically his personality.”

Bucky snorts. “Yeah.”

“To be honest with you, I don’t think I actually know him all that well. I’m not sure any of us do.” Tony pauses, considering. “That first night you guys got here—that was the first time I even saw the guy laugh.”

Bucky nods. He’s not surprised. Steve woke up in an era where everyone knew Captain America and nobody knew Steve Rogers. So he soldiered on and suited up because what else was he going to do?

“Okay, we gonna try this thing or what?” Tony asks, pointing to the new arm.

It looks pretty much like the others. Metal. Heavy. This one is matte black instead of polished silver, but it’s still conspicuous. It’s easy enough to attach. Tony’s first order of business had been figuring out how to attach new arms to what was left of the old one, and he’d created some kind of socket when he made the first arm. (He’d explained it in more detail to Bucky then, but Bucky hadn’t really cared about the specifics.)

“It feels lighter than the others.” He says, once it’s on. 

“It should. I made it from the same alloy I use for my suits.”

Tony checks his reflexes (which mainly consists of just throwing things at him, Bucky catching them with the metal hand) to make sure he got the wiring right. Whatever HYDRA did to link the arm to his brain remained undamaged by Tony blasting most of it off. Tony’s been trying to figure a way to see the connection, but all of his attempts to x-ray it have been useless.

“Wear it for a couple days,” Tony suggests. “Let me know how it goes.”

Bucky nods and thanks him and leaves the workshop. He stops in their apartment, pulls a coat and a hat on—not that he really gets cold anymore, but people notice when someone isn’t dressed appropriately for the weather, and it’s twenty fucking three degrees outside—and rides the elevator down to the lobby. It’s still business hours, and the receptionist nods at him politely. He’s sure she knows who he is, but Stark’s got good people and nobody’s ever done anything but smile and nod at him. Steve, too. 

He gets the subway at Grand Central and he boards a Brooklyn-bound train without even thinking about it. Coulson and Pepper want them to stay in Stark Tower even after Phase Two ends, for security’s sake. Bucky’s got other plans, and he’s hoping Steve won’t be too hard to convince. 

He feels off-balance with the new arm. He’s gotten used to the empty space, the weightlessness. It never bothers him the way he’s heard phantom limbs can. He’s adapted to doing pretty much everything with just his right hand, and for the things he needs two hands for he has Steve. When Steve’s not in fucking Russia, anyway. 

He’s walking aimlessly when he looks up and the street feels familiar. It happens a lot when he’s in Brooklyn. He spent more time here than anywhere else in his life; even if he doesn’t always recognize the neighborhoods he can still find his way around, like a homing pigeon. 

He’s standing in front of a nondescript door next to a Starbucks. He turns. There’s still a grocery store across the street, except now it’s a chain, not a family-owned place. There’s a bar where the hardware store was, and a florist where the bar used to be. 

This is where they used to live, where he and Steve shared a mattress and a very small bathroom and a life, and Bucky knows what he needs to do.


	4. Chapter 4

Hunched in the back of the Quinjet, Sam across from him and Natasha in the cockpit, Steve is tired in a bone-deep way. They’d raided two HYDRA bases, one outside Sochi almost on the Georgian border, and one in Volgograd. Then, as soon as they’d been about to head home, Fury had sent them into the Ukraine and Romania. What was supposed to be a three day op turned into three weeks. It’s never going to end. After HYDRA there will be someone else. There’s always someone else. 

Natasha and Sam had shrugged at the new orders, unbothered by the extra weeks and maybe even eager to spend more time together. Steve can understand it. Working with her is the best way to get to know Natasha, maybe the only way to truly know her, especially the way Sam wants to. 

But Steve got Fury’s orders and could only think of home, of Bucky, of not having to do this anymore. The thought’s been there a long time, maybe the whole time he’s been alive again. But there was Loki, and then there were the handful of weeks he had  _ after _ Loki where he tried to understand where he might fit in this world, and then he answered Fury’s phone call and agreed to move to D.C. because that seemed better than staying in New York and trying to piece together a life from—not even from scratch, from  _ scraps _ , from nothing.

“Landing in about twenty,” Sam says, coming out of the cockpit to sit next to Steve. “You look like shit.”

“Feel like it,” Steve agrees. “Need a shower. And a meal or ten.”

Sam looks at him sidelong. He doesn’t have to say anything; Steve knows him well enough now to read it on his face.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Yeah, I know.”

“You gonna do anything about it?” Sam asks. 

Yes. No. Probably. “At some point.” Steve evades.

Sam snorts. “Nat’s right, you are bad at that.”

“I don’t have her training.”

“Yeah, well, that’s probably a good thing. God help us if you did.”

They debrief in a Stark Industries conference room with Coulson, who looks somewhat less than his normal pristine self given that it’s nearly two in the morning. His tie is crooked, and his trousers don’t have their usual knife-sharp crease. 

“You’re not taking the subway tonight?” Steve asks as they finish up and Sam and Nat start walking toward the elevators, his arm around her shoulders. 

Coulson shakes his head. “Upstairs. It’s possible we’re moving in, even though it’s a bad tactical decision, all of us under one roof—”

“About that,” Steve says, and Coulson holds his hand up.

“We aren’t having this conversation now. I’ve been up forty hours straight. Come see me Monday.”

“Monday.” Steve nods. “Get some sleep, sir.”

They catch the next elevator together, and Coulson gets off two floors before Steve.

His apartment is dark when the elevator doors slide open. He nearly trips over one of Bucky’s sneakers lying in the middle of the living room, and he drops the shield on the couch. He wants nothing more than to shower and slide into bed next to Bucky, but he also doesn’t want to wake Bucky up.

He settles for going into the kitchen and doing something about the rumbling in his stomach. He does a messy job of smearing peanut butter on four sandwiches, and eats them standing at the counter, chewing mechanically. Mouth dry, he roots in the fridge for milk. When he closes the door, carton in hand, he finds Bucky standing in the doorway, gun out, and Steve jumps.

Bucky’s eyes are a little unfocused, crazed even, and Steve sets the milk carton on the counter slowly. 

“Buck,” he says softly. “It’s me.”

Bucky blinks, and then blinks again. His eyes meet Steve’s, suddenly clearer, and the color drains from his face. “Jesus,” he says, his fingers making quick work of unloading the gun, the magazine falling into his waiting palm with a heavy metal-on-metal thunk. He sets both on the counter, his back turning to Steve, and Steve can see the white-knuckle grip he has on the edge of the countertop.

“Buck,” Steve says again, and he reaches, his hand landing on Bucky’s back. He can feel the warmth of him through the thin layer of his t-shirt (no, Steve’s t-shirt, he realizes). “New arm?” he asks, trying to give Bucky something concrete to think about.

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “Hate it.”

“What else is new?”

Bucky laughs shakily and turns his head to look at Steve. “Sorry.”

“My fault. Should’ve come and told you I was home. Didn’t want to wake you.”

“Wake me, next time,” Bucky says, and then he turns, stepping closer into Steve’s space, his right arm sliding around Steve’s waist. The left he leaves at his side, and at some point they’re probably going to have to talk about it, but for now Steve puts both his arms around Bucky and holds him close.

“Babe,” Bucky says, “don’t take this the wrong way, but you gotta shower. I’m just about suffocating here.”

“It’s the uniform,” Steve grumbles. “Tony designed it to be basically bulletproof, but it doesn’t breathe.”

Bucky snorts. “Sounds like Stark.”

He shoos Steve into the bathroom, and Steve almost asks him to stay but there’s something about the tension around Bucky’s mouth that stops him. He needs a minute to collect himself, Steve thinks. 

He showers quick, basically staying under the spray long enough to rinse the grime out of his hair and get the smell of several days’ worth of sweat off his skin. Normally he’d take his time, let the hot water warm him all the way through, until his skin is red and his fingers pruney, but he doesn’t like the idea of leaving Bucky alone that long. 

He emerges from the bathroom still dripping, a towel around his waist. He finds Bucky in the living room, fastening the latches on the box for this newest arm.

“You didn’t have to rush,” Bucky says, his voice tinged with annoyance. 

“Didn’t.” Steve shrugs.

“Don’t lie.” Bucky snaps, and Steve can see he’s more than annoyed. He’s steaming mad. 

“Sorry. You just seemed—

“I know, okay? But I told you this would happen. I’m still him, I’m always going to be him and we can’t just  _ pretend  _ it’s going to go away. I can’t—I don’t want these fucking arms Stark keeps making.”

“Yeah, I noticed.”

“They feel like HYDRA.” Bucky says, dropping onto the couch. Some of the anger has seeped out of him, and Steve sits on the ottoman opposite him. “I know Stark is trying his best but…anything he does is just going to feel like HYDRA.”

“So let’s tell him not to worry about it. I’m sure he’s got about three hundred other things to keep him occupied.”

“He’s under orders.” Bucky grimaces. 

“Orders? Who would—Fury.” Steve sighs. “Of course.”

“I put it together while you were gone.”

“Tony won’t have a problem disobeying an order. He never has before.”

Bucky looks at him darkly, his mouth a grim line. “You say that like it stops with Stark. It doesn’t.”

“I know it doesn’t.”

It never stops. SHIELD doesn’t even exist anymore and Steve is still their pet monkey, putting on his costume and dancing for the crowds. It’s never going to stop unless he stops it. He wants to. He didn’t think he would ever get to a place where he would, because he could’ve done this forever if not for Bucky. 

But there are things he needs to finish first. 

* * *

Bucky has had decades of counter-surveillance training. He knows how to get into and out of anywhere without being seen, knows how to blend into a crowd so well he once struggled to find  _ himself _ on CCTV footage he needed to destroy. When he jogs next to Steve in Central Park, he’s expected to somehow  _ ignore _ seven decades of training and instinct and not react when fifty people in five minutes take his picture. Some of them have real cameras, do this for their job, and honestly Bucky doesn’t begrudge them that. Everybody has to make a living, and he understands that selling a picture of Bucky Barnes and Captain America can feed a family for at least a week. Especially if he and Steve are doing something like kissing or holding hands or Steve’s got his hand in the back pocket of Bucky’s jeans while they walk around the farmer’s market.

(Honestly, that one had probably made enough to feed the hypothetical pap’s family for a month. Tony had also saved it as the screensaver on all the televisions in the tower.)

The ones that try his patience are the people pretending to take selfies to get a shot of the two of them sitting behind them in a restaurant, or recording them to put up on their Instagram story. They think they’re being sneaky, that Bucky doesn’t notice them, and they’re wrong. He sees them all, and he sees all the ways he could be dodging them, but he can’t. Not when he’s out with Steve, anyway, because that’s the whole point of Phase Two.

On days like today, though, he gets to hide behind a slouch and a baseball cap and he suffers through wearing one of Tony’s arms in order to blend better. 

“Why, exactly, are you making me do this?” Bucky grumbles, leaning against a desk to put his face half behind a bookcase and out of sight of the camera in the corner of the showroom. 

“Because Phil has a lifetime ban and I’m not allowed in here on my own.”

“Who gets a lifetime ban from a  _ furniture  _ store?”

Clint puts his hands on Bucky’s shoulders and looks him right in the eye, his expression flat and serious. “Buchanan, IKEA is so much more than a furniture store. You’ll see.”

“So far all I’ve seen are ugly couches and cheap bookshelves,  _ Francis _ .”

“Yes,” Clint agrees. “Which is unfortunate since we’re looking for a dining set and some sort of storage cabinet for the bathroom. Sleek minimalism is all well and good until you need somewhere to stock the toilet paper and extra towels.” 

Clint steers them out of the model living room and back into the aisle with the arrows projected on the floor. The contrarian in Bucky wants to go the other way on principle, but Clint seems to know where they’re going. 

“Why are you moving into the tower?” Bucky asks while Clint looks at a series of dining tables, taking pictures of some to send to Coulson. 

“Uh, do you realize how high Manhattan rents are?” Clint says, frowning at a bamboo table with drop leaves. He raises and lowers one of the leaves before moving on.

“I’ve been looking at places in Brooklyn, so, yeah.” 

Clint shoots him a look. “Since when?”

Bucky shrugs. “Couple months. Been thinking about the end of Phase Two.”

“What does Cap say about that?”

“Haven’t told him yet.”

Steve knows Bucky’s been going to Brooklyn. They talk about the things he sees, notices, remembers, forgot. They talk about the things that are different and the funny little things that stood the test of time somehow. They don’t do much reminiscing, because there’s a lot Steve doesn’t want to remember and a lot Bucky can’t. 

Steve doesn’t know Bucky’s been looking at  _ apartments  _ in Brooklyn.

It doesn’t matter, because Bucky’s pretty sure he can’t actually live there. He doesn’t want to go backward. He doesn’t want to try to replicate a life he doesn’t really remember except in bits and pieces. He also, for a lot of practical reasons, can’t imagine living with neighbors on the other side of the wall. It doesn’t seem safe for anyone. He can hear too much, can sense too much danger everywhere. He’s on high alert even now, in this stupid store, with so many people around him. 

“This one, I think,” Clint says, at a table big enough for six with chrome legs and a shiny white top. “It will match the kitchen.”

Bucky thinks it looks like an operating table, but decides not to say it. Clint picks yellow chairs and gives up on finding the bathroom cabinet. 

“You should tell him,” Clint says, after he’s arranged for all the boxes to be delivered to the tower tomorrow. 

“I know. But I don’t think he’s ready yet.”

Clint shrugs. “Won’t know until you bring it up.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. He can’t talk to Steve about it now anyway. He was back from Russia and Eastern Europe for three days and then Fury sent him and Natasha to fucking Iceland. Steve had been annoyed, but he’d suited up and kissed Bucky goodbye, his face grim the way Bucky’s gotten used to. Somehow, he’s the only one who can see how much Steve  _ hates _ every minute of this. Or maybe he’s just the only one who cares.

* * *

“You’re gonna be okay,” Natasha tells him, and Steve’s not sure he believes her. There are three bullets in his gut, and for some reason he’s not healing, and the problem with being the independent Avengers is that they don’t have an entire agency’s worth of resources behind them anymore. There is no med evac, no SHIELD field office in Reykjavik that can help them, no relationships with other local agencies that can get him into surgery ASAP.

Natasha is basically sitting on him to keep pressure on the wounds, in a (futile, maybe) attempt to keep him from bleeding out while she calls every person she can think of. 

“I wanna call Bucky,” Steve says. His mouth tastes like copper.

“That’s a quitter’s attitude, Rogers,” Natasha snaps, and maybe it is, but Steve feels like he did when he nosedived The Valkyrie into the Arctic. Like maybe quitting is the only option.

Except.

Except Bucky had been dead, then, and he’s not now. Steve squeezes his eyes shut, pictures Bucky as he is now, maybe he’s sitting on their couch watching some terrible sci-fi movie, or he’s curled up in their bed taking a nap, and maybe Steve is there with him, Bucky warm and solid in his arms—

“Steve,” Natasha slaps him across the face. “You don’t get to die here.”

“ ‘m not,” Steve says, although he might very well be.

“It’s like you don’t listen when I talk.” Steve blinks, confused. Because that’s Tony’s voice, and Tony, Steve is pretty sure, is not with them. 

“You’re on speaker, Tony,” Natasha says. “Tell me what to do.”

“There’s a first aid kit—

“A first aid kit?!” Natasha’s voice is shrill. “Don’t you think we’re a little past that?”

“Sure, but this is me we’re talking about. Open it up.”

Natasha fumbles in the bag behind him, the one they’d almost not even bothered bringing except it helped with their cover as tourists, and pulls out a red zippered case.

“Okay,” Tony says. “Grab the epi-pen looking thing. It’s a sedative. It works on the Hulk, so it should be strong enough for supersoldier over there. He’s not gonna wanna be awake for the next part.”

“Tell Bucky— Steve starts to say, but Natasha jabs the sedative into the meat of his leg.

“I’m not telling Bucky anything, do you think I have a death wish,” is the last thing Steve hears before he goes under. 

He wakes on the quinjet. His head is fuzzy and his limbs feel weighed down with lead. He’s in more pain than he was after letting the Winter Soldier beat him half to death, and that’s really saying something. 

He must groan, because Natasha glances back at him from the cockpit, her expression grim. “Sorry,” she says. “We’re out of painkillers until we get to London. Darcy’s a pain in the ass but she got us cleared to land on the helipad at King’s College Hospital and they’ll take you into surgery right away.”

“Bucky—

“Is on Stark’s jet. He’ll be there by the time you’re out of surgery.”

Steve nods, and closes his eyes. 

He wakes again, jostled by their landing even though he’s sure Natasha tried to make it as smooth as possible. The door at the back of the jet lowers, and two orderlies with a gurney rush onto the quinjet. Natasha helps them lift him; he’s nothing but dead weight and it takes all three of them. The London air is cold and damp, heavy with fog. Natasha probably had a hell of a time landing. 

The floor the orderlies roll him onto is silent, and Natasha follows as far as she can before they reach the OR. She kisses his forehead, which is more frightening than reassuring, because Steve knows she’d only do it if things were very, very bad.

_ Tell Bucky I love him _ , he tries to say.  _ Tell him I’m sorry.  _ But he can’t seem to get the words out, and then they’re pushing him through the doors and leaving Natasha behind.

* * *

The flight to London is agony. At least it’s not commercial, at least he can pace back and forth all over Tony’s plane with nobody to look at him sideways (except Tony, who’s doing his own fair share of pacing). 

He’d known as soon as he’d gotten back to the tower and found Tony waiting on their couch that something was wrong. Tony’s respected their privacy ’til now, never came in without calling first, and certainly never when they weren’t there. 

“Steve’s hurt,” he’d said. “Natasha’s getting him to London, we can be on a plane as soon as you’re ready.”

“Now, I’m ready now.”

“Do you wanna—

“No, let’s go.”

That had been three hours ago. They have another four to go. Tony gave up trying to make conversation somewhere on the way to the airport. Bucky’s alternated between feeling like he’s going to puke and feeling like he needs to  _ break something _ since Tony told him.

He figures that’s why Tony’s here at all, aside from the fact that it’s his plane. Iron Man can put him down (probably) if he loses his mind. It’s not a bad call; he feels pretty damn close to the edge. 

“What I don’t get,” Tony says somewhere over Ireland, “is why now? He’s taken bullets before. Barely misses a step.”

Bucky sighs. He knows the answer to this one. “HYDRA. They made me. You think they didn’t have a way to stop me, just in case?”

“How’s it work?” Tony frowns. Bucky can practically see his brain switch on. 

“The bullets are like buckshot...so, you know, they spread. Inside the shell, there’s some kind of anti-clotting agent...chemical, whatever you wanna call it. We might heal fast, but it’s hard to do if your blood won’t fucking clot.”

“Jesus,” Tony says.

The image of Steve bleeding out rises unbidden in front of Bucky’s eyes. His stomach flips, and he lunges for the kitchen at the back of the plane. He hunches over the sink and vomits, mostly bile. 

Tony follows, and pulls a water bottle from the mini-fridge. “Here,” he hands it to Bucky. 

He takes it, gratefully, and twists the cap off with his teeth. Tony’s eyes flick down to his metal hand. 

“You don’t like this one either,” he says. It’s not a question. 

He drinks down half the water bottle in one gulp, trying to chase the taste of bile from his throat. “I’m not gonna like any of them,” he admits. “Let’s just quit while we’re behind, okay?”

“That’s...not really how I operate.”

“I figured. But no matter what arm you put on me, I’m only ever going to feel like the Winter Soldier, and I’m really trying not to, these days.”

Tony looks at him, considering, for a long moment. Then he nods. “Okay. But if Fury asks, we’re still working on it. We’ll tell him we’re having a hard time fitting new arms to old wiring.  _ Technically _ , I’m under orders, here.” Tony winces.

“Yeah, already figured that out. Steve’s gonna tear Fury a new one.”

_ Or maybe not _ , Bucky’s traitorous brain supplies.

The customs agent comes onto the plane when they land (because apparently this is how the other half lives, they don’t even have to wait in line to get their passports stamped), and Tony does some smooth talking and probably heavy bribery to explain why Bucky’s traveling with a birth certificate from 1917 and driver’s license issued three months ago. Bucky could’ve easily bypassed passport control, but that would’ve run counter to trying to live his life more or less on the grid lately. For the first time in seventy years, he actually  _ needs _ to start leaving paper trails. 

There’s a car waiting for them on the tarmac, and Tony slides in behind Bucky. He thumbs through his phone, frowning.

“He’s out of surgery, according to Natasha. But somebody at the hospital leaked that he’s there, so we’ve got a pretty serious welcoming committee of press waiting for us.”

“I don’t give a fuck about the press. Tell me more about Steve.”

“They’re not telling Natasha much, she’s not family.”

“Neither are we.”

“Yeah, I already thought of that.” Tony opens the briefcase he brought off the plane with him (Bucky assumed it was his Iron Man suit, but apparently not) and hands Bucky a document. 

He reads it, not comprehending it for a few seconds. Then, “You  _ forged _ a marriage certificate?”

“Of course not. That’s the real deal.”

“Jesus, Tony.”

“I admit all the signatures are fakes, but nobody’s gonna look  _ that _ closely. It’ll get you through the door.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that still counts as forgery,” Bucky snaps. “But thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.” Tony says. “Not just because it’s definitely illegal.”

“Drop me off around the block,” Bucky says, when he sees the crowd of reporters and photographers on the sidewalk. “You can deal with them.”

“Gee, thanks,” Tony says, but he doesn’t argue. 

Bucky waits on the sidewalk, gives them time to double back, and when he hears the reporters all shouting, “Mr. Stark! Tony! Iron Man!” he rounds the corner and walks behind them all, casual as you please. 

It’s quiet inside the hospital, as it’s the middle of the night, and there’s no wait at the reception desk.

“I’m here to see Steve Rogers,” Bucky says, and the receptionist rolls his eyes. 

“Yeah nice try, you can go back outside with the rest of the press or security can escort you out. Your choice.”

“No,” Bucky says, “You don’t understand.”

He slides his driver’s license and Tony’s fake marriage certificate across the counter, and the receptionist’s eyes go wide. “Right. Sorry, sir. Let me just print you a visitor badge.”

The badge prints on a sticky label, VISITOR at the top in bold lettering,  _ Barnes, J  _ it reads below, and under that,  _ spouse _ and  _ Rogers, S. _

The receptionist hands it all back to him and Bucky peels the badge free from its paper backing and sticks it to his chest. 

“He’s in room 416A. Looks like they moved him out of recovery a few minutes ago. Take this corridor straight back, the lifts will be on your right, just past the cafe. Up to the fourth floor. Just pop by the nurse’s station and they can direct you from there.”

“Thanks,” Bucky says, already walking. 

His phone buzzes with a text while he’s in the elevator. Tony. _ Found Nat. They won’t let us in until visiting hours tomorrow. Heading to my place in Chelsea, call if you need anything.  _

There’s one nurse at the nurse’s station when he steps out of the elevator. 

“Reception rang,” she says, smiling kindly at him. “He’s just down the hall, there.”

“How’s he doing?” Bucky asks. His heart ricochets in his chest, waiting for the answer.

“He’s had a rough go of it, but his surgeon seems confident he’ll make a full recovery. She’ll be back first thing tomorrow if you’ve got any specific questions.”

Bucky nods tightly. “Right. Thanks. It’s all right if I—

“Go ahead,” she nods, and he hurries down the hall. 

Steve’s room is dim, lit only from the hallway, and the curtain is pulled around his bed. Bucky moves quietly, slipping inside the curtain without a sound. 

Steve’s eyes are closed, and he’s pale, but he’s  _ whole _ and his chest is rising and falling steadily, and the vitals on the heart monitor look normal (for Steve _ ,  _ anyway). There’s a chair by the bed and Bucky drops into it heavily. He swallows hard around the lump that’s been in his throat since entering the hospital, but it’s no use anymore. He covers his mouth with his hand to muffle the sound of his sobs, he doesn’t want to wake Steve up, especially for  _ this _ . 

It doesn’t work, of course. 

“Buck?” Steve says, his voice hoarse. 

“I’m here,” he says. Steve reaches for his hand, and Bucky takes it, squeezing hard. “I’m here.”

* * *

“This was a close call, Captain,” the surgeon says, looking at Steve seriously over her glasses. “I don’t reckon you get many of those.”

“No,” Steve agrees, feeling almost cheerful now that he’s convinced the nurses that he really, truly didn’t need the morphine drip which was doing nothing but make him slightly fuzzy and that Bucky is here, sitting beside him, his hand still in Steve’s. 

“We’re going to keep you here a few more hours,” she says and Steve opens his mouth to argue that he feels  _ fine.  _ The doctor holds up her hand to forestall him. “I know, I know. But let’s at least give it twenty-four hours since you got shot, shall we?”

She doesn’t look a thing like Peggy, but she rolls her eyes at Bucky in commiseration and for a moment it could be 1944 again, because Bucky shrugs at her and Steve can see exactly what he’s thinking ( _ tell me about it, doc _ ) so Steve sighs, and agrees. 

“You okay?” he asks Bucky, once she goes and they’re alone again. 

“I’m grand,” Bucky says, all sarcasm. “This is exactly how I wanted to spend this weekend.”

“Buck—

“I’m joking, Steve, I’m fine,” he says quickly. Steve doesn’t believe him. The tightness around his mouth has always been his tell; depending on the lie, he’s always either trying to keep from frowning or laughing. 

Steve moves over, making space in the narrow bed. “C’mere.” Bucky hesitates, his eyes darting to the hallway. “They don’t care. I’m not even hooked up to an IV anymore.”

Bucky nods and moves, climbing in next to Steve. It’s a tight fit, and Steve laughs. “This reminds me of when we were camped in the Alps, somewhere on the Italian border. For once it was you that was cold.”

“I don’t remember,” Bucky says. “What did we do?”

“Both tried to fit in my cot. I pushed you out, accidentally, and you got all sore with me, went to sleep in your own. I woke up to your teeth chattering.”

“Yeah, well, Army cots don’t have these nice rails to keep your partner from pushing you out.” Bucky snorts. “How did we even have cots? Mostly I remember sleeping on the ground.”

“We’d joined back up with the 107th for a couple days to restock ammunition and rations. And spend a few nights  _ not _ sleeping on the ground.”

“What happened?”

“That was in ‘44, so after that—

“No, last night. I thought that suit Stark made you was bulletproof.”

“Basically bulletproof, I think I said.”

“Then I guess he has some improvements to make,” Bucky scowls. “Good, he can focus on that instead of an arm for me.”

“It’s not Tony’s fault. I wasn’t wearing the uniform. It was only supposed to be recon. Nobody expected to find an active base in Iceland, of all places.” 

“I should be out there with you,” Bucky says. “I know HYDRA, I know how they operate. I would’ve been able to tell you it was active before you went in.”

“Is that really what you want?” Steve asks, because he doesn’t know. He hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it since the night he found out Bucky was drafted. In every possible way, Steve chose this life and Bucky didn’t. If Bucky wants to join him in the field, wants to help dismantle what remains of the organization that further took his choices away, Steve will do whatever he can to make that happen, regardless of the liability Fury and Coulson think Bucky is. 

“No,” Bucky says quietly. “I want you to stay with me.”

“I’m not going anywhere, Buck.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Bucky scrubs his hand over his face. “I know this is selfish, okay, and that I don’t deserve to decide what happens to Captain America. That’s your call. But I don’t want to start up again. I want you to  _ stop _ .” He pauses, like he’s waiting for Steve to argue. Steve doesn’t and Bucky shoots him a surprised look before continuing. “The first time around…yeah you were wearing the costume and you were calling yourself Captain America but you were always  _ Steve _ . Now, you suit up and all I see is Captain America. You let him eclipse you. Or everybody else did, maybe, because they didn’t know you. They didn’t know you were getting lost in there. And I’d keep my mouth shut if I thought you were happy but…you aren’t, are you?”

Steve’s first impulse is to lie, because he’s been doing it since they brought him up out of the ice. But this is Bucky, and he can’t lie to Bucky. “No. I want to stop.” 

“Then stop, baby. Please stop.”

“I can’t stop yet, Buck. HYDRA—what they did to you, I can’t stop unless they’re gone.”

Bucky’s face falls. “Steve, they’ll never be gone.”

“They will— Steve starts to insist, but Bucky shakes his head and his hands clench into fists, gripping Steve’s blanket tightly. 

“You know their mantra, Steve. Cut off one head, two more appear. They’re  _ everywhere _ , and if it’s not HYDRA it will be someone else. If you gotta keep fighting for yourself, then fine, but don’t do it for me. I’d much rather have you than have you die on my behalf.”

Steve opens his mouth, argument at the ready. Except…what’s the point? Bucky is right, and Steve knows it. And he wants to stop. 

“Yeah,” he says, and Bucky’s jaw goes slack in surprise. “Yeah, okay.”

“Steve,” Bucky says, sounding worried, “don’t do it just because I asked.”

“Why not? I’d do  _ anything  _ you asked me to, sweetheart.” He means it to come out light and maybe a little silly, a little over the top, but that’s not how it lands. His voice sounds rough and too sincere and Bucky sucks in a harsh breath. 

“Babe,” Bucky says, his voice low, his eyes dark and boring into Steve’s. There’s something dangerous about it, a little more Winter Soldier than Bucky maybe, and Steve feels a thrill in the pit of his stomach. 

Before Bucky can continue, though, Steve hears the sound of familiar voices bickering in the hallway, and Bucky slides out of the bed. Steve wants to grab him and pull him back, but he’s already halfway to the door. 

“Oh, there he is, see I  _ told  _ you we were going in the right direction,” Tony says, and then he and Natasha are stepping over the threshold.

Natasha has dark purple circles beneath her eyes and her hair is braided a little sloppily off her face. The smile she gives him is weak.

“I’m fine,” Steve says, rolling his eyes. “Doc just wants to keep me a couple more hours for observation.”

She rolls her eyes back, and Tony claps him on the shoulder. “You know, I don’t design you state-of-the-art suits for my own entertainment.”

“Yes, you do,” Steve snorts.

“Fine, not  _ purely _ for my own entertainment. They’re to keep your dumb ass safe, too.”

Bucky catches Steve’s eye and tips his head toward the hallway, and Steve nods. He slips away, for coffee or food or air or whatever it is he needs when his face gets that tight, pinched look. 

“He okay?” Tony asks, even though Bucky probably isn’t actually out of earshot yet. “We had a rough flight over.”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “I think so. Or he will be, once we’re home.”

Home. They’re going to have to find a place. Living in Avengers tower doesn’t make much sense if he’s not an Avenger anymore. He knows Tony won’t kick them out, but if he doesn’t leave he knows, deep down, he’ll never really stop. They could find a place in Brooklyn, maybe. Expensive, but he’s got more money than he knows what to do with anyway. May as well put it to use for something.

Natasha is looking at him, and when he meets her eyes one of her eyebrows arches. Somehow, she knows. He shouldn’t be surprised.

“I’ll go call the pilot,” Tony says. “Tell him we should be ready around...four? That’ll get us back to New York in time for dinner.”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Sounds fine.”

Nat takes Bucky’s empty chair. “You’re sure?” she asks him.

He nods. “It’s time.”

She leans back in the chair and puts her feet up on his bed. “I think I’ve known it for awhile. You’re different, now he’s back.”

Steve doesn’t feel different. He feels like himself, but he understands how that looks different to everybody else. 

* * *

Bucky’s phone buzzes with a text, and when he checks the screen it says it’s from Francis. He grins, and thumbs it open. It’s just a link, nothing else in the message, and he’s not sure what he expects (Barton’s sense of humor is questionable at best, offensive at worst and he’s sent Bucky a lot of things Bucky wishes he could unsee) but a real estate listing is probably the last thing. 

He swipes through the pictures and scrolls to read some of the specifics, hope swelling in his chest the longer he looks at it. 

He’s just hanging up the phone when Steve comes through the door, laden with grocery bags. 

“Ran into Coulson on my way up,” he says, handing off one of the bags to Bucky and going to the kitchen. Bucky follows and starts putting things in the pantry while Steve unloads the cold stuff into the fridge and freezer. 

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. He’s got me on Fury’s calendar for Tuesday.”

“Good.”

Steve’s still technically recovering from his Icelandic injury, although he probably could’ve been cleared by medical three weeks ago. He’s making it hard for them, though, screening their calls and “forgetting” his appointment times. Bucky suspects he’s having fun, digging into some of his old stubbornness for the sake of it, making Fury’s life difficult. He’s wanted to do it, Bucky thinks, since they figured out Fury’s plan to get Bucky back in the field. 

“Wanna come somewhere with me?” Bucky asks, when the groceries are put away. 

“Sure,” Steve says, easily. “Where?”

“It’s a surprise.”

They ride the elevator down to the garage, and Bucky punches in the code for the lockbox where Tony keeps the car keys. He’s got a “my car is your car” approach to most of the vehicles down here, except his favorites, and Bucky grabs the keys for a nondescript American-made SUV. Even Tony agrees sometimes having a car that blends is ideal. 

Steve climbs into the passenger seat, and Bucky starts the car. 

“It’s, uh, gonna be a bit of a drive.”

“Okay,” Steve shrugs. 

It takes them an hour to get out of the city, and then they’re driving north, along the Hudson. Steve takes control of the radio, spinning the dial every time they get out of the station’s range and the static takes over. 

They’ve been in the car nearly three hours when Bucky takes an exit off the highway. They drive through a couple suburban neighborhoods, and then everything around them starts to open up, the houses getting farther and farther apart until there’s miles between them, manicured lawns giving way to thick forest on either side of the road.

He almost misses the turn, except the ‘For Sale’ sign catches his attention just in time. The driveway is gravel and nearly a half-mile long. When they reach the house, Steve is looking at him, amusement in his eyes. Bucky throws the car into park and cuts the engine, and for a second they sit looking up at the house. It’s a 1920s farmhouse, white with green trim and shutters. The porch wraps around two sides of the house, and there’s a good sized barn set a couple hundred yards back.

“For our horses?” Steve asks wryly.

“I was thinking a car, some motorcycles.” Bucky shrugs. “But sure, we could be horse people.”

Steve snorts, and shoulders open his door, hopping out. Bucky follows. It’s cooler here than it was in the city, and Steve zips his jacket. Bucky climbs the steps up to the door. There’s one of those key boxes on the doorknob, and he consults his phone for the text from the realtor. It opens easily with the combination, and Bucky takes the key and unlocks the front door. 

The rooms are empty. The owners retired to Florida almost ten months ago, and it’s been sitting on the market since. The realtor had been thrilled to hear from him. 

“It needs some updating,” she’d warned him. “The owners lived there for sixty years, didn’t do much to it.”

They find the kitchen at the back of the house, and Steve laughs. “Does this stuff still work?”

“Yeah,” Bucky grins. The fridge is a GE from the 50s, and the stove looks about as old. The countertops are wood, sanded so much over the years they feel like velvet when Bucky reaches out to touch. 

There’s a mud room off the kitchen with a washer and a dryer, significantly newer than the kitchen appliances, and a bathroom next to that with a big clawfoot tub and hexagonal tiles on the floor. 

Upstairs, there are four bedrooms, two on each side of the hallway, and another bathroom at the end. The biggest bedroom faces the backyard, which slopes slightly downhill toward a small pond. 

They go back downstairs, and Steve stands in the front room, looking around. (Bucky’s already picturing a nice big sofa, maybe a leather sectional like they have now, and some cozy chairs in here. Maybe a TV above the fireplace, maybe not.)

“So, I take it we’re not moving to Brooklyn?”

They haven’t really talked about it, so Bucky’s not surprised that’s what Steve was thinking they’d do. “I can’t,” he says. “It will be too much.”

“Too much how?”

“I’m just barely managing in the Tower, even with all of Tony’s soundproofing. Living in Brooklyn—in any apartment, anywhere—it’s gonna drive me crazy. That constant, low-level hum of noise from so many people, plus the traffic and the sirens...I’d be white-knuckling it, all the time. I feel like I can breathe out here. Let go, a little.”

Steve reaches for him, catching Bucky’s face between his hands. “Buck—

“Maybe we could move back to the city one day,” Bucky says, “but for now…”

Steve shakes his head. “I understand. I do.” He pulls Bucky in, holding him close. Bucky wraps his arm around Steve’s waist. 

“Is it too much house for us?” Bucky asks.

Steve shrugs. “How am I supposed to know? I’ve never lived in a house.”

“I mean, four bedrooms seems excessive?”

“Buck, we drove three hours up here and now you want to talk yourself out of it?”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to buy the first house you see.”

“Admit it, you wanted it as soon as you saw those relics in the kitchen.”

Bucky laughs. “Yeah. Kind of. It seemed appropriate. The smallest bedroom would make a nice studio for you. The windows face south. Lots of light.”

“So that brings us down to three bedrooms.” Steve nods. “One of which should probably be a guest room. Sam will want to visit.”

“ _ All  _ your friends will want to visit,” Bucky snorts. “Maybe we should look for a place farther away.”

“Tony has his own plane. Nowhere would be far enough.” Steve grins.

“So, one studio, one guest room, and one bedroom for us. That just leaves us with one extra.”

“I’m sure we can find something to do with it. TV room?”

“Library?”

“Yoga and meditation room?” Steve smirks. 

“Nursery,” Bucky says, and closes his mouth so quickly his teeth click together. “Jesus,” he says. “I don’t—that’s not—

But Steve’s eyes go dark and soft, and then he’s crowding into Bucky’s space, pushing him against the living room door frame and kissing him hard. “Yeah,” he says against Bucky’s mouth. “Maybe. Someday.”

“Maybe a dog or two first,” Bucky says, feeling dazed.

Steve grins. “Two. Or three, even. Four.”

Bucky squints. “You talkin’ dogs or babies?”

“Either. Both. Whatever you want, Buck.” 

“Jesus,” he says. “What else should I ask for, while you’re feeling so accommodating,” and Steve’s laugh fills him up, makes him feel like the things he wants really aren’t that far out of reach after all, after seventy years of not being able to want anything.


End file.
